Matthew Green

Thanks for the tip about Facebook beta app. I shall probably never use its standby screen background settings ever again as it seems to pick the most embarrassing ones possible! (or i need to set up a 'safe' album for it). There are still features that i need to use the browser version for but overall its a much better experience!

Good news as always.

Bing offers does looks interesting, and it works in the UK (sort of unless you try and tell it where you are). It already has massive competition in this space over here so im curious how successful it will be. Pretty has won people over before and its fairly snappy too... so just needs to start picking people up and actively support some other countries as locations. 

I cant say I had noticed Bing Deals before though.

Xbox - Im still waiting for a console to take me away from the PC. Immersive content features like the illumiroom could be that pull if it is successful but it would likely just end up on the PC as well?

I guess I was lucky enough to watch the registration being open for about an hour (really need some friends to go with). Sadly my money went to a competition in Ireland and probably would prefer to go to some other events (TechEd, etc) over build.

Xbox Music - we have been getting ads (or has it just been the windows 8 version)? I think I ended up watching the trailer for A Good Day to Die Hard about 40 times, and some other audio ads. I switch between Nokia music for more of a mix and Xbox when looking for particular songs/albums and artists, quite impressed with both after leaving spotify. Oh I see new ones from Targetspot.

Happy birthday - enjoy some free time and perfect your naughts & crosses strategy, or move onto  connect 4, then Othello/Reversi then Chess. Depends how much free time you have after a foam party? Have a Foam party, that does sound good.

This will save me a few hours of work! Well done. When I can save some pennies or £180 for the starter kit I shall have a play. I presume no one else knows where to get them apart from Apple over in England?

lost my comment.
Like the app, and I agree with dtower that it would be great to add the ability to add comments.

A feature to make mixes of show(s) and or tags would be nice and a counter for new ones which have not been seen (new ones) would be brilliant too.

Flash - why wont you die? Its sad that we still need it, but HTML5 standards are evolving too slowly. The black list over white list will certainly benefit some of our users while flash sticks about.

I think if i were at uni now I would make use of OneNote (I already use it heavily on the windows phone and a fair bit at work, the desktop version (as well as outlook in a way) it is great for copping snippets, sources, media and sharing it with others).

Like SrikanthPatel I was quite fond of the software provided in Dreamspark, which made visual studio more available, and I began messing about with robotics studio (which led me into CCR & DSS and my first challenges in parallel processing and coordinating actions based on the results of tasks).

Most of our course was theoretical so the pen and paper was ideal and on a plus the paper was easy to throw away. Fun times. I do find it entertaining that large amounts of students today still have trouble using the basic features of 'office' software and software like them on Linux and Macs. Its like they don't experiment with them anymore that they just use them because they have to. So anything like the complexity of Word Pad is sufficient.

Im not sure if the 365 offer will make much of a difference (it is a good value subscription though). They are starting to notice the web apps on the online sky drive, others are over at google docs, mac users use something dull ... (and that money can go towards food and bear!). The rest are content with free alternatives. Any version of Word 2007+ is great for the dissertation (2003 wasn't as good at adding references). Some courses will also provide the students access to the software for free through MSDN subscriptions.

Rafaya your link works for me (the one at http://asp.net/vnext). Try this one as an alternate:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=282650

This update process is proving to be fantastic. I've especially been looking forward to more OData support and querying.

logging in means getting distracted by visual studio achievements.

Thanks Laura and Paul; This has always been one of the shows to watch. Its up there with "this week on channel 9" on shows I watch each week.

The touch develop bit reminds me of the visual programming language of Microsoft's Robotics Studio (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb483088.aspx) but probably more user friendly. I cant see that I will be running to it any time soon as I prefer to get a little dirtier. Great for those learning to develop though, if you can get them past the visual representation.

Keep it up.