Jackie Goldstein's Weblog

Mary Jo Foley has a pair of new articles on experimental programming languages up on Redmond Developer News. 

Virtual PC 2007 has been released to the web and is available for free download here.

Several months ago, I pointed out the great series of videos on Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0. Well, the ASP.NET web site has outdone itself again, with a series of 23 "How To" videos on ASP.NET AJAX.  Download the videos by Joe Stagner of the ASP.NET team from here.

Scott Guthrie just keeps on rolling with his great blog posts and presentations.  Here is a great first look at some of the new features in Orcas (next version of Visual Studio), including screen shots and a link to a PPT of his.   The next CTP, due out within a month, is going to bring together alot of features that have been floating around separately until now - including some cool features that Scott hasn't mentioned yet :-)

If your situation is anything like mine, you also find yourself without Office 2007 installed on all of your computers.  Onteh other hand, alot of people, or at least all of the people that I deal with at Microsoft, are already sending around documents in the new Office 2007 file formats (i.e., .docs, .xlsx, pptx, etc).   What to do ? Fortunately, the folks at Microsoft anticipated this situation and have provide an Office Compatability Pack to allow you to both read and write the 2007 file formats from within Office XP and Office 2000.  I just installed it on an XP laptop and it works like a charm !  Download it from here.

Yesterday's major developer event for Microsoft developers, Microsoft Developer Academy,  was a great success.   Over 2,000 developers attended the event, which offered a choice of 25 different breakout sessions, plus another 6 panel discussions. I sat in on several sessions, and was very impressed (I would have attended more, but had to leave early since I was exhausted from lack of sleep and jet-lag, since I had just returned from a 2-week trip to Seattle and Neew York).  The feedback on got from people I spoke to was that they also enjoyed and learned alot from the sessions.

If you have been waiting for the released version of the Microsoft AJAX offering, you can now download it from here.  This page has separate downloads for the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions as well as for the AJAX Control Toolkit.   Congrats to Microsoft !

Here is an interesting article on blogging from today's New York Times.   It is particularly timely it that it expresses an opposite perception to that which triggered the recent Blog Tag success.   Whereas Blog Tag was a response to the feeling of not really knowing the people behind the blogs, the NYT articles addresses the issue of sometimes being a little too close to blog writers.