In a welcome about face, Microsoft has decided to make Expression Blend and Expression Web available in MSDN subscriptions. Soma Somasegar makes the announcement....Initially Microsoft was intending to separate out the new Expression design tools from the developer resources.

Source: Expression Web and Blend to join MSDN
Originally published …

True, I'm only up to "L" in my aggregator, but this post on Lambda The Ultimate looks like the day's best announcement: 

Redmond, WA: At an unusual press conference held this Sunday morning, Bill Taylor, Microsoft's General Manager of Platform Strategy, announced that after much research into the causes of …

IDG's newsweekly, InfoWorld, is moving to an online-only format (Read Steve Fox's, its Editor-in-Chief, discussion). Fox says that InfoWorld is not "going away," but so far the conversion of a print readership to online has been, at best, problematic. There have been some credible attempts ( Byte, for instance) but the …

In the airport today, I saw a fellow browsing Sudoku books. Flipping through them, seemingly evaluating pages as one might check out a writer's style. I thought about going up beside him, looking over his shoulder and saying "Well, that one's trivial," or "Oh, that one."

Last night I had …

Naysawn has announced that the Visual Studio unit testing framework (MSTest) is moving into the Pro SKU of Visual Studio. That's a good start, but I want to lobby for going the whole way:

Please move the unit testing framework into the .NET framework.

Source: MSTest Moving to VS Pro …

I've never met Kathy Sierra. I don't subscribe to her blog. But I am utterly, utterly appalled to hear that she was subjected to death threats and, while those who threatened her are below contempt, nor should there by the tiniest portion of toleration for those who attempt to make …

Dream Games has extended their registration date for their Build a game in a year and increased the prize money to \$10,000. They have also explictly stated that TorqueX based games will be allowed. Last date for registration is April 1st 2007

Source: Another \$10,000 competition - for TorqueX …

The easiest Jolt vote I've made in years was for stpBA Storyboarding, a product which every architect and team lead owes themselves to evaluate. I would say it is revolutionary, but it is better than that -- it simply makes the way you probably already work vastly more efficient.

Essentially, it …

The Jolt Awards were announced last night. The list of winners is below. We had some particularly competitive categories this year (in Technical Books, I advise you to simply fill your shopping cart with the finalists). Most delightful, this was a year where there was some real innovation, which I'll …

I started to write a post on version-control patterns ("How to pack your trunk") when I realized what a can of worms it was. Essentially, every time I wrote down "the way I've always done it" I realized that there were always trade-offs -- that what worked in some situations wouldn't …