From the Editor

Part of my job is to educate the public about what is new and what is important, so in this note I will cover some of the exciting new stuff we are involved with. To start off with, I wanted to let you know that there is great new content available (or available shortly) around Internet Explorer 8 RC1 for developers & IT professionals. This includes a series of 28 IE8 How Do I Videos, 10 Virtual labs, and a series of corresponding fact sheets with code snippets to highlight key features in IE8. Each video covers quick/short overview of the feature (what it does), why you'd use it, and how to use it.

What about AJAX security? If this is a concern, I have the perfect link. On March 11, 2009 at 10:00 A.M., Bryan Sullivan will build a sample AJAX application using design patterns, advice, and code samples from respected resources in the AJAX community. Then the glaring security vulnerabilities will be exposed. Register for the webcast.

How would you like to win $5,000 in a Silverlight developer contest? What's your creativity worth? Build, shape, and code your game concepts, and you stand to win $5000. Through April 15, Microsoft is asking game developers to dust off their best game ideas and bring them to life using Silverlight 2, the flexible new platform for delivering rich online content to your audience. Enter the contest.

Are you a software tester and want to learn about VSTS 2008 Tester Edition? Jot down March 10, and register for Coffee Talk: Visual Studio Team System Tester Edition.

Are you a database professional and want to learn about VSTS 2008 Database Professional Edition? Free up your calendar on March 24, and register for Coffee Talk: Visual Studio Team System Database Professional Edition.

Finally, are you interested in the upcoming features of the yet unreleased Visual Studio Team System 2010? The date to remember is April 7. Register now for Coffee Talk: Visual Studio Team System 2010 Highlights. Feel free to also contact Lori Borg at Northwest Cadence. Northwest Cadence specializes in application lifecycle management and does a fantastic job at educating the world on Visual Studio Team System.

Be sure to mark all these dates on your calendar. As for myself, unless I enter it into my Outlook calendar, it blows right by me and I miss out on something that could have saved me a huge amount of time.

Many of you might be surprised to know that several months ago Microsoft joined the Apache Foundation. Microsoft is committed to supporting Web standards interoperability. That's why we have contributed code to Stonehenge, which is one of the Apache projects designed to test the interoperability of Web standards implementations. IE8 is a dramatic step forward in the adherence to Web standards. I'm happy to say that Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test, which is part of the Web Standards Project.

In closing, I want to talk about what I am most excited about these days: Live Mesh. Live Mesh won for best technical innovation at the Crunchies awards just a few weeks ago. There is much more to Live Mesh than meets the eye. Most of us understand that Live Mesh allows us to synchronize programs and content across many types of devices using standard http protocols. But it promises to deliver much more than that. Live Mesh also allows us to develop applications that are deployed to the cloud. That means your applications can spread virally, synchronizing across devices around the globe. By the time you read this I will have demonstrated the ability to develop various application types that are hosted in the cloud, that read and write data from the cloud, that can be accessed only by those individuals whom I have invited. Live Mesh is part of Live Services and is a critical part of the overall Azure Services Platform.

More on this next time, and happy learning,
Bruno

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