I have been using the Microsoft Development Tools since 2002, working with every iteration including the beta versions. However the 2010 edition of Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010 makes huge improvements to developer productivity and functionality, allowing developers to focus on their core competancy. Writing Code!

I have had the honour of working with the Microsoft MVPs for some time now, and have to admit that they continue to amaze me. The South African MVPs are making waves locally and the international MVPs are just as passionate and driven.

The Visual Studio Ranger team has started the year of extermely busy by publishing quite a few projects to CodePlex. Among them is the Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 VM Factory which I was a proud contributor off.

Microsoft has officially announced the launch date for Visual Studio 2010 and also released the Beta 2 version to MSDN subscribers with Go Live licenses in place. There has been quite a few changes we will look at over the next few days.

Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1 has been available for a while, and as part of the VSTS Rangers projects we have been working with the new builds in virtualized environments. With powerful new features the next edition of TFS looks exciting, and we have a brief look into what's new. Over the next few weeks we will do some indepth looks at TFS 2010 and the new frontier provided by Microsoft.

DevDays 2009 South Africa is happening in March and will be bringing some awesome sessions to the Developer Community, including Silverlight, WPF and even XNA Game Studio. Register Today!

Eben De Wit is running the quarterly DevChat event in KZN on the 13th of November 2008 at the Riverside Hotel in Durban.

During Tech-Ed I was interviewed by Ruari Plint about South African Communities, in particular on what it means to be a community lead and also on what challenges communities face. The video has been posted on the Tech-Ed Online website.

Tech-Ed Online contains video interviews with key speakers and visitors of Tech-Ed. Currently the South African interviews are available for download from the MSDN site. This year quite a few of the local bloggers and community members featured in these interview.

Microsoft has released new versions of two awesome development tools. FxCop allows for code analysis to be done on already compiled .Net assemblies while StyleCop analysis your code during development with full Visual Studio integration.

At Tech-Ed 2008 I had the opportunity of presenting a talk on Developing for Windows Mobile targeting the new and extensive feature list in Windows Mobile 6.1. This was my first official talk for Microsoft and I was extremely satisfied with the outcome and thankful for the opportunity.

Hosting Community Lounge at Tech-Ed is no simple task, and a few people from the industry and the community deserves a huge amount of credit with their help and assistance at the lounge this year.

DevDays 2008 was a huge success and I was extremely glad to have the support of so many people at the community lounge. It was a busy 3 days with more people then we ever imagined but the exposure was amazing.

We are in the middle of planning for Tech-Ed 2008 and this year the communities are high on the agenda with the biggest ever community lounge planned. Please join us at the Durban ICC for 3 days of technology and information sharing brought by some of the industries best.

The MVP's and community leads took over Microsoft in JHB to host the first every interoperability day, an event where Linux and Microsoft technologies come together and proof that there is no borders when it comes to technology.

I am about to do my Microsoft Exams for my MCT and compiled a list of all required exams and references required to complete these exams.

Overall overview on Tech-Ed 2007 held at Sun City. The event was packed with 2000 attendees and the speakers and sessions where filled with an amazing array of new information from the Microsoft Stable.

Overview of the Microsoft DevDays 2007 event held at Sun Coast Conference Centre. Information regarding Visual Studio, ASP.Net AJAX and Silverlight was provided by the speakers.

Small Business Server 2003 is part of the Action Pack subscribtion and provides small businesses with network services out of the box. The installation is straight forward and everything well integrated for small to medium sized companies.

We recently invested in a Microsoft Action Pack subscription and have started to legalize all our software at home. The action pack prooves to be a brilliant value for moment solution for small business.