"So what happens in those meetings? Are they brainstorming earth-shattering new ideas? Are they inventing new products? Why are they getting paid to join so many of them? [...] Let’s take a look at some of those meetings: Strategy reviews, deep dives, virtual coffee breaks, quarterly off-sites, monthly get-togethers, director summits, leadership meetings, etc."

"The idea that a 10-person company of 20-somethings in Mesquite, Texas, could get its software on more computers than the largest software company in the world told him that something fundamental had changed about the nature of productivity [...] The success of Doom made it obvious that this was no longer the case. There was now little value in doing the same thing even twice; almost all the value was in performing a valuable creative act for the first time."

"If it all gets a bit much, Visual Studio 2010 does include a pleasing beginners' mode where, instead of typing spells, they can be drawn using a convenient drag-and-drop interface. This GUI gameplay eschews much of the complexity of the full game—the compiler gatekeeper is almost always happy, and few bugs will lurk in the resulting dungeons—but works well as a way of learning how to craft spells."

"Microsoft provides virtual machine disk images to facilitate website testing in multiple versions of IE, regardless of the host operating system. Unfortunately, setting these virtual machines up without Microsoft's VirtualPC can be extremely difficult. These scripts aim to facilitate that process using VirtualBox on Linux or OS X. With a single command, you can have IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9 running in separate virtual machines."

Of course I find this a day after I finish rebuilding all my VMs from scratch by hand.

"In a nutshell, to get the Microsoft User Data folder out of your Documents folder, just move it to your user's Library/Preferences folder. Do this while Office isn't running, and the next time you launch an Office app, the folder will stay right where you put it." Thank Jobs for that.

"The collection of essays expands on the vision of pioneering computer scientist Jim Gray for a new, fourth paradigm of discovery based on data-intensive science and offers insights into how it can be fully realized." Free book from Microsoft Research.

"Enables you to easily add Microsoft Ajax Library and jQuery scripts to your Web applications" if, horror of horrors, you should need to do something involving MS Ajax.

A classic quote from last time round: "The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work. Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster."

This whole situation is so wrong.

Old, but I keep misplacing this link. "We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously."

I hate myself for marking this. "ASP.NET AJAX is built-into ASP.NET 3.5. It is also available as a separate download for ASP.NET 2.0."

"Allows you to use TortoiseSVN and other Subversion clients with Team Foundation Server. It converts the calls made by your Subversion client to the API supported by TFS." I really hope I don't have to use this.

"Inside the CrowdFire pavilion, event attendees could upload their photos, video, and text to a new site that made it possible for people not in attendance to experience the event." Not entirely convinced.

"Open means that providers and consumers are free to use the protocol in whatever way they wish. If they want to only accept OpenID from a trusted subset of providers, they can go ahead."

Great article on the whole IE Version Targeting thing, including some excellent point on Mac/Safari user base and not relying on pure percentages when deciding on browser support.

"Following Opera's action, today I am calling on Bert Bos, chairman of the CSS Working Group, and those higher up within the W3C including Sir Tim Berners Lee, to immediately disband the CSS Working Group in its current form."

"Eventually, once every efficiency has been wrung from the web, they'll start to need those skills of imagination, craft and intuition that our funny little industry has so painstakingly acquired."

"Microsoft threw an invite-only gathering at its London offices: something about start-ups and Web 2.0. [...] Here are the notes I took…"

"Pagulayan runs a testing lab for Bungie that looks more like a psychological research institute than a game studio. The room we're monitoring is wired with video cameras that Pagulayan can swivel around to record the player's expressions or see which but

"Microsoft had its hand forced this week into unveiling just a little of its arsenal in the war to win the browser battle on the mobile phone."

"Outlook 2007, released next month, will stop using Internet Explorer to render HTML emails and instead use the crippled Microsoft Word rendering engine."

Dan describes problems with how "Microsofts' new alternative for hotmail, Live Mail" affects HTML emails.

"Collaborate online with colleagues, customers, and partners in real time, between either individuals or large groups"

"Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL."

"Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced tonight that they will all begin using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web. Now based at Sitemaps.org, the system instructs web masters on how to install an XML file on their servers that all thr

Waaaaah!

"For Word to work correctly, however, there are several Golden Rules you need to followed."

"What strange new behaviour do we have to look out for in IE7? Are there things that work as expected in IE6 that don’t in IE7?"

"A little app that would automate the whole process and run Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 in standalone mode. You can run multiple instances of it with no problem."

"Download and extract my IE7 Standalone package, download the IE7 installation from Microsoft and copy to the same directory, and run the setup batch file."

"If you are serious about the practice of software development, you should avoid SourceSafe."

More on SVS: "Safely install software in a virtual layer".

"I'll tell you how you can still run IE7 in standalone mode despite the security update."

Lock, log off, restart, or shut down Windows with a single click!

"a small program that will convert Microsoft Access Databases to MySQL"

"There are many fine solutions for revision control systems. SourceSafe isn't one of them."

Become a more efficient user of Microsoft Excel with these keyboard shortcuts.