I received a request from a customer this morning asking where they might be able to find upcoming developer events. I compiled a quick list and sent it off and it struck me that I should probably share it with all of you as well. Here you go…

MSDN Events
A series of free in-person events for Software Developers and Software Architects.

TechNet Events
A series of in-person events targeting IT Pros and led by the IT-Pro Evangelists.

MSDN Flash Newsletter
Customize the newsletter with your zip code and then click the “From the Editor” section where I and my fellow Evangelists post upcoming community events and user group meetings.

Microsoft Events site
An aggregation of in-person events, webcasts and podcasts led by Microsoft and it’s partners.

Community Megaphone
A site to facilitate sharing and discovery of events relating to software development

Oh and of course… the event calendar on this very blog.

I would like to thank everyone who braved the snow and the EARTHQUAKE to come out for yesterday’s MSDN Event on the Windows Azure Platform. Here are a number of the resources highlighted during the presentation as well as the slides:

Resources:

• Windows Azure Portal
• Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.1 (February 2010)
• Windows Azure Training Kit
• Windows Azure Developer Center
• Azure on Channel9
• Azure Training Course on Channel9
• Lessons Learned Series on Channel9
• Windows Azure Platform Forums

Tools:

• SQL Azure Migration Wizard
• Azure Storage Explorer
• Cloud Storage Studio

PDC Sessions:

• Windows Azure Tables and Queues Deep Dive
• Windows Azure Blob Deep Dive
• Windows Azure Diagnostics, Logging and Monitoring in the Cloud
• REST Services Security Using the Access Control Service

White Papers:

• Windows Azure Table – Programming Table Storage
• Windows Azure Blob – Programming Blob Storage
• Windows Azure Queue – Programming Queue Storage

The release of Visual Studio 2010 is right around the corner. For several months, developers have been plugging away at the Beta bits and we have received valuable feedback. Based upon that feedback, the Visual Studio team has decided to push out a Release Candidate (RC) that is now available for you to download.

Jason Zander provides some additional details regarding the RC…

We got a lot of invaluable feedback on Beta 2 through Connect as well as your survey responses.  In particular many of you pointed out areas of performance where we were not at parity with VS2008 and it was impacting your ability to adopt the product.  Some of those areas of feedback included general UI responsiveness (including painting, menus, remote desktop and VMs), editing (typing, scrolling, and Intelisense), designers (Silverlight and WPF in particular), improved memory usage, debugging (stepping, managed / native interop), build times, and solution/project load.

You can now download the Visual Studio Release Candidate and continue to provide your valuable feedback.

Scott Guthrie is taking it one step further by inviting you to submit your feedback to the Visual Studio Connect website, but also sending him an email directly:

Our goal with releasing the public RC build today is to get a lot of eyes on the product helping to find and report the remaining bugs we need to fix.  If you do find an issue, please submit a bug report via the Visual Studio Connect site and also please send me an email directly (scottgu@microsoft.com) with details about it.  I can then route your email to someone to investigate and follow-up directly (which can help expedite the investigation).

The team is also looking for feedback regarding the install experience as well.

Visual Studio 2010 is a MAJOR release. A number of items (based on customer feedback) has been ripped and replaced with leading-edge technologies. All of this effort to gain customer feedback is to make sure we’re ALL (Microsoft and the community of developers and users) is happy with this release. We all want a tool that is going to help us succeed in what we do – write software!

Go download the bits now!