Brian H. Prince

The new Zune's are out. The tv ads are quite 'abstract'. You should check them out on YouTube (or wherever). The famous pink bunny one is my favorite.   Video: Zune TV Spot There are some great new features. I like the new zunePad interface (since I still have a v1, I looked at the V2 hardware in the store). But my favorite feature is the new wireless syncing. I have been asking for this feature for years. I want to leave the Zune in my car, and when I pull into the garage, have it connect to my computer over wifi to sync. That's just awesome! And there is awesome support for podcasting. A great feature there is that you can unsubscribe form a pod cast on the device. When you go into the marketplace, there are hundreds of podcast series available, most for free. You can also provide your own URL if you want. You can change some settings for each series. Such as how many of the shows to keep (from just the newest one, to all of them), what order they should be played ...

CodeMash v2.0.0.8 is coming quicker than you know. The Early Bird pricing is going to close on November 15th. After that, the price will rise form $125 to $175. Alumni will still be able to register for $110 until December 15th. If you haven't received your alumni code, please let us know. The final session list has been published as well. We will soon announce the keynoters (big drum roll) over the next few weeks. Go register already! http://www.codemash.org

The launch event in Columbus was yesterday. I think it went very well. I was excited to see the room packed, and we had a lot of great conversations around BTS, SOA, and WCF. Several people asked for the decks. I believe MS will be sending them out to the attendees, but I will post them here (at least the ones I used) here as well. And congratulations to William for winning the Xbox 360 Halo 3 Special Edition! 

No, I am not taking a trip to here , here , or here . Oslo is the codeword (gosh, I love code words for products. I still think of VS2005 as Whidbey.) for the next generation of SOA enabling products and technologies from Microsoft. Oslo was recently announced at the SOA conference in Seattle, WA this week. Oslo is a very small word for something so big. I have been fortunate to be involved in some groups that get to provide feedback and input into the shaping of this strategy. And it has been killing me not being able to even talk a little bit about it. I have to be careful and only talk about what MS has been public about. Parts of Oslo are the next versions of BizTalk, WCF, WF, Visual Studio, and a whole raft of other technologies that CSD are trying to bring into alignment. The MS platform provides a bunch of great techs today to do SOA, and build ESBs. The current problem is that the toolset is rich, but not well aligned. These investments will make these solutions that much e...

Jeff Blankenburg, the Dev Evangelist for the Microsoft Heartland District has launched a new screencast series titled JUXtaposed . JUX stands for Jeff on User Experience. Or Jeff Unglues Xylophones. His first screencast is a quick 10 minute walk through of some simple animation in XAML using Expression. What I like about his 'cast is that it isn't perfect. Smooth demos are nice, but when there are small mistakes, the speaker gets to show you how to debug and fix things. That is a very handy skill when you are trying to learn something new. I hear he is going to do 25 of these.   The best part? He chose to pimp CodeMash by animating our logo! And it only took him 10 minutes. Thanks Jeff.