I'm excited

At times, working in the IT industry seems to be a little slow, dull and much the same as the previous day. this has been the case lately with the media continuing to blast Microsoft over Vista. Everywhere you turn, there are complaints, "10 reasons why x is better than Vista" and any other thing you can possibly imagine.

As for me, I've had no major issues with Vista, I use it to work, i use it to play, and for the most part, it works.. Sure, there are one or two little things that I may think need improving, but that's the same for any OS..

But, I guess back to the topic, and that its the reason for my excitement.. The last few days have reminded me exactly why I love this industry. Here's why:

Tuesday I started a new Job, and we also started to get information flowing in from PDC2008. The big news items, well, here they are:

• Details on Windows 7 have started flooding in, it's Vista but it's better..
• The Announcement of Windows Azure.. Yep, the cloud computing OS
• And Office on the Web

I'm not going to go into details of each and every feature here, but there are a lot. I guess what I'm more interested in is the fact that a company who, according to the press is "struggling" to provide such wide ranging announcements and to even get a lot of positive feedback from folk who have been very critical of late.

I can't wait to get my hand on some of this.

Silverlight 2.0 Released

The title says it all.. And here's the link to the announcement. For me, this is what I've been waiting for, Silverlight 1 was nice, but lacked a lot of features that I personally believe were required to make it useful beyond media streaming and basic flash type apps.. Silverlight 2.0 brings in everything I need as a developer to really start pushing it for internal business apps developement.. Yay!!!

Current Reading List

I thought I'd just put up a quick post of my current reading list. So, here it is:

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
The God Delusion
Fish!

I don't know why, but I quite often find myself reading a few books at the same time.. Maybe I need to learn to focus a little more ;)

w00t

I just read over on Mitch's blog about some new features that are going to be included into the next release of TFS Power Tools. Each of these new features looks awesome, but one caught my eye in particular that I personally can't wait too see. that feature is the new Team Members folder. Not only will this allow you too visually see who is in your project team, but it will also provide integration with your *IM client for presence, notification and vital communication functionality.

I'm all for collaboration, and any tools that help me communicate better with team members is a win in my books.

*If your IM client supports it..