Could it be that my earlier rant on IE caused that team to get going?  Obviously not, but as this IE Team post makes apparent, the IE team has been doing some serious work.  Kudos to the team for an important achievement, though I think criticism of the team for their "skunkworks"-like silence is still valid.

New Horizons of Minnesota, Microsoft, and RBA Consulting will be hosting a new conference for the Twin Cities next year called TechFuse.  The conference will cover a range of Microsoft technologies and will include a track on Visual Studio 2008!  This should be a really good conference and there are some great speakers already lined up for the VS 2008 conference.  Go to http://www.nhmn.com/techfuse for more information and registration (early bird rate available until Jan 15th, 2008).

Just a reminder that the Twin Cities XNA UG meets this Thursday.  Check out the details and RSVP here.

Stumbled across this blog post on Craig McMurtry's WebLog.  I haven't seen it referenced any place else so thought I would pass it along.  Good stuff.

I had the chance to sit down with Shannon Braun, a Microsoft MVP, to talk about doing enterprise WPF development in the real world (download here).  Shannon has been working for the past year on a large WPF project at a large customer here in the Twin Cities.  During the podcast, we cover why WPF was used instead of WinForms, developer-designer integration, resources for getting started, and more.  It's an informative 30 minutes and lays a good foundation for future podcasts around WPF.

You can check out Shannon's blog at  www.sysknowlogy.com.  You can also get some good WPF intro info at http://blogs.msdn.com/jfoscoding/articles/765135.aspx and a nice introduction at http://www.davidchappell.com/blog/2006/09/introducing-windows-presentation.

A couple of pals of mine have started a new podcast series.  Dave Bost and Larry Clarkin are already up to episode #4, so it is worth checking out what's happening this week with The Thirsty Developer.

Looks like the NBA has elected to go with Silverlight to power their NBA.COM multimedia offerings.  MLB.Com is already on Silverlight.  Now if we can just get the NFL and NHL to follow suit, life will be dandy.

I had to pick up something this weekend at the local Best Buy.  I walked into the store about 5 minutes after it had opened on Saturday.  I quickly strolled to grab my item and headed to the check out lane.  It was already a bit of a line, and as I looked around, I noticed of the 15 people or so in line, almost 90% of them had a Wii in their hands.  I asked the lady next to me, "Is there some kind of sale on the Wii?".  "Nope," she said, "they are just hard to find."

Hmmm... everyone has heard the Wii has been immensely popular but I had never actually "seen" that effect in real life.  It was kind of amazing.  As I stood there, at least three other people joined the back of the line and all three also had Wiis.  There were others visible from my point in line still wandering the store, Wiis clutched to the chests like they were rescuing an baby from a fire.

Pretty impressive.  I am not a big Wii fan.  I've played it - it's cute for a few minutes, but I must be from that hard core gamer set (even though I don't play a ton of games and even play all that often) because it just didn't resonate with me.  My ten year old son is in the same boat as he has said many times, "the Wii is weak".  Of course, he is a big Halo 3 fan which does not seem to be the market segment the Wii is aimed at.

Regardless, it was fun to see a "phenomenon" first hand...

For those of you that have been checking out Volta, and more importantly, those of you interested in Volta, some interesting things to keep in mind.  I just found these out myself (mushroom factor at work again), so I apologize if it looks like its the old bait and switch.

The key take-away is that Volta is just an experiment.  It is a way for Microsoft to test out and get feedback on different approaches to influence the direction of Microsoft products.  Volta will never become a product itself so don't look for a future CTP program, beta, RTM, etc.  There may or may not be updates to Volta, so play around and have fun, but don't use it for anything that you may have to move into production and support.