What piece of software is used in Windows, Office, MySQL, and many other places? The Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset.

But even better, did you know it's open source? And, did you know that it is developed by an all-volunteer team.

It's developed after hours, come along and meet the team and attend one of their developer meetings.

Rob Mensching's blog talks more about it too.

Sorry about the bad video right at the beginning.[more ]

Jeff Barr, Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, dropped by my office the other day and showed me the winners of the Microsoft/Amazon Web Service Contest. Cool stuff, congrats! More details are up on the Amazon Web Services blog.[more ]

Jeff Barr dropped by Scoble's office the other day and showed us the contest winners from their recent Web Services contest that they held with Microsoft. More details on the Amazon Web Services blog.[more ]

Jim and Dan are two seemingly normal Microsoft employees who I've been watching from afar (they work for Microsoft Consulting Services). When hurricane Katrina hit they dropped everything in their lives and got in a plane and flew to Austin, TX. Hear their story about the technology they deployed (they architected, and developed the Katrina Safe Website for …[more ]

Over in building 50 there's a secret room. It's never been shown in public before. What is this room for? Testing audio devices. It is a special room where it's completely silent and the walls have been treated to minimize sound wave reflections. After giving us a tour Charlie Owen, PM on the Media Center team, gives us a little taste of Windows Vista's Media Center features and shows us how to build your first Media Center application. Great discussion of Xbox 360 and the latest in Media Center…[more ]

Recently I visited Richard Anderson's classroom at the University of Washington and watched how he used Tablet PCs to teach his computer science class. It is really cool. Students can send him notes, post their thoughts, and interact with him, via their Tablet PCs. This technology came out of Microsoft Research's ConferenceXP Project and the UW Classroom Presenter has a site which has more details and downloads too. The first minute of the video shows off his classroom then we start an interview…[more ]

Ric, director of strategy on the top secret Motion Incubation team, runs the Motion initiative. What's that? It's a group at Microsoft that studies how businesses work and looks for opportunities to help them do their business better. They made an entire map of how business works.

Motion's research led to the acquisition of Great Plains, too (which led to the Dynamics suite of services/applications).

Enjoy this look into a team you've never heard of before today and see h…[more ]

April 1, 2006 -- Mike Hall uses Windows CE for everything. Including building a network enabled refrigeration device (NERD) with the NERD feature pack, released today.

While you're watching that video, we also have some other videos for you to consider this weekend (sorry, downloads won't be available for these videos). These are all about fun pranks that have happened at Microsoft over the years:

Mardella Brekke and Dee Dee Walsh
A cra…[more ]

This is a second, deeper look at Excel 2007's business intelligence capabilities (Mike Arcuri was on Channel 9 a few weeks ago). Really cool stuff for helping your business see what is happening.

The demos start at 6:15 into this video. Really great stuff, if you are an Excel freak, don't miss![more ]

The Developer Solutions team invited Ken Levy over to check out their first 3 power toys for Visual Studio 2005.  In this video, you’ll meet the team and catch demos of MSBee, Managed Stack Explorer, and the TFS Administration Tool. [more ]