Here. "LonghornBlogs.com is a community initiative to help spread the word with factual information about the next version of Windows, straight from the people that are building it. Because of this, the majority of people posting here (at least for now) will be Microsoft employees. Our intention here was to keep the signal-to-noise ratio extremely low. You won't find too many personal posts here, just good solid information about Longhorn."

Here. Microsoft quietly released Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 and Paul Thurrott loudly loves it (although he certainly identifies "opportunities for improvement" as well... : ).

Here. If you see a little "Send comments on this topic" link, it launches an email to MS where you can complain about the docs, e.g. the .NET Mutex ctor. I had always ignored that link, thinking that I'd never get a response to email sent that way, but I was wrong. In fact, when one of the readers of my WinForms book [1] was trying to mix single-instance detection and no-touch deployment, he found that he couldn't. When he looked at the Mutex docs, they didn't list the appropriate permissions that creating a named Mutex requires. So he complained. And he got a response w/in 24 hours! And I got dragged into the ensuing conversation to fix the problem! I had *no* idea that little link would yield those kinds of results. Today I am proud to be a Microsoft employee. : ) [1] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0321116208

Here. While the .NET Resource Kit is targeted at VB programmers, it comes with tons of real 3rd party controls for free that work just as well for C# programmers as well as VB.NET programmers.

Here. "Are you curious about the new Microsoft® Office System, including the latest versions of Office Professional Edition, Outlook®, and the all-new OneNote™ note-taking application? The current Insider show is a perfect way to whet your appetite for their release this fall, plus get the latest information on Tablet PC."

Here. An interesting summary of the impact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is having, and about to have, on the world.

Here. Sure, sure, MIT is well known for their high-tech education, blah, blah, blah. What I think is *much* cooler is that MIT's Open Courseware project has also put up a large number of courses from the Sloan School of Management, where I can learn all kinds of investing, finance, marketing and business basics from folks that aren't trying to upsell me. I wish MIT provided discussion forums so that I could talk with other students "taking" the OCW courses when I was or MIT students or faculty that didn't mind answering questions, but just having the materials up is *huge*. I think I'll start with 15.433...

Here. This 3-part series really belonged as a chapter in my WinForms book, but after doubling the estimated size of the book (not to mention the amount of time it was supposed to take to write it), my publisher was anxious for me to stop writing. For those folks accustomed to the document management support in MFC or for anyone that needs to build document-centric WinForms application, I think you'll like this series. Part 1 discusses the basics of document management in SDI WinForms apps. Part 2 discusses MDI apps and deeper shell integration. Part 3 wraps most everything up into a reusable component, turning the construction of document management features in .NET largely into some drag-n-drop and some property browser settings. The resultant FileDocument component is available in the latest Genghis sources (although not yet in the release zip) @ http://www.genghisgroup.com Enjoy.