I got this in my e-mail because I am still technically running a MSN group for the UCNUG leadership. I don't recall any messages on the group for the last 2 years so for me this is a non-event but there may be others who have changed e-mail addresses and would like to know that their groups (and the history) might be going away

Dear MSN Groups Customer,

As a valued MSN Groups or MSN Communities Web Folders customer, we want to notify you that the MSN Groups service will close on February 21, 2009 and you will have the opportunity to move your group to our new partner service, Multiply. We understand the importance of keeping your group together, so we partnered with Multiply to create a migration process that moves your group to their service to preserve your online community and its history. Read on to find out about how to kick off the automatic migration of your group to Multiply.

We realise this may be unexpected, so before presenting your options we want to briefly share why we've made this decision.

Why?
Because we are dedicated to providing our customers with the most current and user friendly technology available today we made the difficult decision to close the MSN Groups service. This decision is part of an overall investment to update and re-align our online services with Windows Live. In the long term we believe that closing the service is the best way to continue to offer innovative and effective services that help you stay in touch with the people you care about. We plan to launch a new Groups service in the coming weeks, but unlike MSN Groups, Windows Live Groups will focus on offering a place for small groups to collaborate. Multiply is available now, making it your best option today for continuing to share and communicate together online.

Options for moving your group to a new service
We've listed some options and resources below to help you decide what to do with your group.

• Option 1: Automatically move your group and its data. We have established a partnership with Multiply, an online group and media sharing service so our users can choose to migrate their group to Multiply's service. Choosing this option is free and easy to use: Multiply will move the Group's content on your behalf and invite members to re-join your group in its new location. To begin the migration click here.
• Option 2: Start again on another service. You can start from scratch and create your group on a different service but we recommend having your Group moved automatically by Multiply. This will enable your Group to transition easily and continue to enjoy the community you have created.
• Option 3: Start again on Windows Live Groups. To further expand our mix of communications and sharing services, Windows Live will launch a new service this autumn, Windows Live Groups. We plan to launch Windows Live Groups to the public in the coming weeks as a service that helps small groups or clubs collaborate online.

Options for MSN Communities Web Folders users
If you use save files to the MSN Communities web folders (also known as "My Web Sites on MSN" or the web folder "My Groups"), these services are part of MSN Groups and will therefore will also be closed on February 21, 2009. We recommend that if you store files online using MSN Communities web folders that you back up these files locally, then upload them to another online storage service such as Windows Live SkyDrive. For more details on how to find and move files saved to your web folders, visit the MSN Groups Resource Center.

Your Next Steps
We have sent this letter to each MSN Groups user, whether member or manager. If you are:

• A member or user of MSN Groups: Check with your group manager to determine whether they plan to migrate the group.
• A manager: Visit the MSN Groups Resource Center to learn more about your options and consider soliciting feedback from your group members about what they would prefer to do, when and how. The Resource Center also provides a sample splash page you can use to notify your members that the group will move. If you're ready to move the group now, click here.

What to Expect between now and the closing date
Between today and February 21, 2009 the MSN Groups service will remain the same as it is now. We will remove the option to add more storage to your group but other features will remain until the service is shut down and you can use it the same way you do today until the date of closure.

Where can I learn more?
You probably have more questions, and that's why we created a website to address them. Please visit the MSN Groups Resource Center at any time for the most up to date answers to common questions, information about migrating your group to Multiply, contact information for our support staff, and important dates.

Our support staff are equipped to answer your questions and guide you through issues that may arise as you decide what to do with your group. They are ready to help so don't hesitate to contact them at MSN Groups Customer Support with your questions.

We thank you for using our services and regret any inconvenience this may cause.

MSN Groups, Microsoft Corporation

Join us on Wednesday, January 21 for our meeting. As always we will be meeting at the NuSkin NOC at 1175 S 350 E Provo.

We will be hearing from TekSystems on how you can remain relevant in today's economy. We will be talking about the skills that will help you to keep your current job or to move onto a new job if you want to.

Please invite your friends and join us.

I had a good time at the “Best of PDC” event in Salt Lake City today. Rob Bagby is a good speaker and he brought out some features of the REST Starter Kit that I hadn’t picked up on.

On one of the breaks I was talking with Rob and Craig Berntson and Craig mentioned a new release of the Azure SDK. I hadn’t heard anything about it. When I got home I had the following message in my e-mail.

Greetings from the Azure Services Platform Team!
We are excited to announce that we have released an update to the Windows® Azure™ SDK and Visual Studio Tools. These latest releases are available here:

• Windows Azure SDK: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=130232
• Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=128752

These newly released SDK and Tools include:

• Bug and performance fixes
• Improved integration with Visual Studio
• Performance improvements with execution and debugging scenarios
• Improvements to Storage Client and ASP.Net provider samples
• Added support to debug Silverlight in a web role

We will continue to release updates to Windows Azure and its tools based on your feedback. Please visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=130231 to share your Windows Azure experiences.
Thank you for your continued interest.
Sincerely,
Azure Services Platform Team

The really nice thing is that even if you don’t have a key to run the Azure developer fabric on your own machine so you can still play with it even if you can’t release your creation on the world.

Salt Lake City January 2009 Windows Azure Cloud Computing User Group

Join the community...

Don't miss the opportunity to be at the first local meeting of the Windows Azure Cloud Computing User Group in Salt Lake City. Windows Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform. At this meeting, you'll hear about Microsoft's vision of Software + Services and what it can mean for you. As part of this presentation, you’ll see a demo of how a cloud application is developed and deployed.

Who Should Attend?

Cloud computing has huge implications for both developers and business people. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor and be part of the community that helps pioneer this exciting new area.

When: Tuesday, 1/20/09, 6:00 - 8:00 pm
Where: Microsoft, 123 Wright Brothers Drive, Ste. 100, Salt Lake City, Utah 84116
Registration link:

Please take a moment to register so we can plan properly. Registration is necessary for building access. Pizza will be served before the presentation starts.

Does cloud computing offer anything compelling for you, your business or your customers?

• Cloud computing with Windows Azure provides technologists with new options for where applications reside, how applications behave, and the business models that drive them.
• Cloud computing eliminates the need to predict traffic levels, purchase hardware or hosting capacity in advance, and keep os’s patched. Applications are given the capacity they need on demand. You only pay for computing and storage you use.
• Some of the most difficult and costly things to achieve in I.T. such as high availability and ensuring scalability are no longer headaches the enterprise has to deal with. Scalability, reliability, and high availability come with the platform automatically.

Developers no longer have to make a choice between the benefits of what can be delivered to users via the web versus traditional on-premises software. Microsoft offers the opportunity for developers to offer both with a software-plus-services approach. It is an industry shift that combines services on the Web with client and server software to deliver the best of both worlds.

Please contact Mike Erickson at mike.erickson@neudesic.com or phone at 303-248-8321 with any questions about this community user group event.

Microsoft is presenting 2 sessions to cover the highlights of PDC at the Microsoft offices in Salt Lake. Here are the details.

 

Please join us as we present some of the highlights of PDC! 

We will be reviewing some technologies first discussed at PDC -- such as Windows Azure and C# 4.0.

But we will not only be talking about the future.  We will also discuss some recent releases that you can take advantage of now, including the WCF REST Starter Kit and the Silverlight Toolkit. 

We’re offering this session twice in one day, so that you can chose the one that fits best into your schedule.

Please only register for the session that you will attend.

MORNING SESSION
Time:  8:00 am – 12:30 pm

Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032399782&culture=en-US

   OR

1-877-673-8368, reference Event ID 1032399782

Thursday, January 15, 2009
Salt Lake City Microsoft Office
123 Wright Brothers Drive, Suite 100
Salt Lake City, Utah 84116

AFTERNOON SESSION
Time: 1:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032399784&culture=en-US

   OR

1-877-673-8368, reference Event ID 1032399784

The sessions will be broken down as follows:

AGENDA    

TIME	TOPIC
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm	Welcome / What to expect with C# 4.0
2:00 pm – 2:30 pm	The Silverlight Control Toolkit
2:30 pm – 2:45 pm	Break
2:45 pm – 4:00 pm	REST with WCF and the WCF REST Starter Kit
4:00 pm – 4:15 pm	Break
4:15 pm – 5:30 pm	Overview of Windows Azure (“The Cloud OS”) and Azure Services

Every attendee will receive a free “.Net REST in WCF” T-Shirt.

I keep going back and forth on whether I should make predictions or not. Mostly it is because I hate being wrong. This year I decided to rank my predictions along a scale of how confident I am so I won’t feel so bad when some things just don’t happen.

Safe Predictions
1. The economy is going to get worse before it gets better. The upshot of it all will be that IT budgets and salaries will be impacted and those people/programs/applications who can show value will be rewarded while those who can’t will go away. I think the most visible part of this will be the consolidation of several IT companies.
2. Web 2.0 will be the “only” web we talk about. I am not saying that everything site will become a social network or be AJAX enabled but that people will get tired of the 2.0 moniker and just call it the Web again.
3. The browser wars will become relevant again. With the expected release of IE8 and updates to Firefox and Chrome there will once again be great interest in standards and features of browsers.

Moderately Risky Predictions
4. Online advertising will be hit especially hard by the economic downturn. I have watched Google vs. Microsoft for many years and almost everything boils down to the advertising and the revenue it produces. I believe that as companies get conservative with their advertising budget they will pull back from online advertising more than TV or print. I think this would be a good choice since the click through rate is so low that it would be easy to justify cutting back. This will make the whole Microsoft Yahoo! non deal seem irrelevant.
5. Windows 7 will be released in time for the Christmas buying season and will be on new machines but will not see a lot of upgrade licenses. I hear a few people who have decided not to upgrade to Vista say they are waiting for the next version. By the time Windows 7 gets here their machines will be a year older and the prices of new machines will have dropped more making less sense for them to upgrade their machines. If you are already on Vista you might upgrade to Windows 7 but again the same economics of more memory and cores on machines make replacing machines an attractive option. I am hoping that at some time Microsoft will begin to treat the OS as something that people will mostly replace and make design decisions based on it.

Wild Guesses
6. Business intelligence will become more important. I have been reading experts that say that they feel that BI will be less important as companies scale back on their budgets. I feel the opposite should happen. The amount of data being collected is not going down so companies should be investing in BI and data mining to make the data into an actionable asset.
7. Cloud computing will not be widely adopted. This may seem like a safe guess but I am conflicted about whether companies will perceive an economic benefit to cloud computing that outweighs the cost of retooling and retraining. Again some of the other experts I have been following say they feel the cloud will be an area of excitement and a lot of investment. I am guessing that the vast majority of companies and developers will be more inclined to go with safe bets when spending their budgets rather than betting on a new platform.

On this last day of 2008 I am keenly aware of the clock and the influence it has in our lives. Especially today there are 2 issues of clock and computers that have to be fixed.

Zune No More
According to this article at cruchgear Zune 30 GB all over the world are refusing to boot all the way. Mine is one of them. I guess all I can do is be patient until a fix or workaround comes out.

PDC CSD VPC
I meant to blog this last week but I didn’t. The VPC image from PDC with Oslo and the other CSD products has an issue where Visual Studio will/has expire on January 1 (It is already 01 Jan 2009 in some parts of the world). I don’t know if you can get it back after the expiration but if you haven’t run into the problem yet you need to disable time synchronization between the VPC and the host OS so you can set the time independently. If you have joined the VPC to a domain this will not work and you will have to wait for the CTP. You still only get 2 months of run time with the VPC so I wouldn’t leave it running 24x7 but this should extend your life for a little while.

Jeff Beehler’s blog post gives instructions on how to disable the time synchronization.
If you converted your VPC image to Hyper-V then this post will help you disable the time synchronization.

Last night Microsoft Update prompted me to install an update. I thought it was the updated definition files for Windows Defender and told it to go ahead. A little while later I was being prompted to restart my machine. I thought “What in the world? I haven’t ever had to reboot after a Defender definition update.” After the reboot I looked and saw that it was a patch to IE. I realized it was out of band and therefore probably very important. Today I have had several e-mails that look like the one below. Microsoft seems to want us to patch our machines.

Download urgent security update for Internet Explorer

Today Microsoft released an urgent security update for Windows Internet Explorer. Because the flaw may expose computers to remote code execution, the severity rating for this security update is critical.
From the moment we learned of the issue, Microsoft has been working around the clock to respond to this situation and provide a security update that helps protect our customers.
If you have turned on Automatic Updates, your computer will install the security update automatically. If you don't use Automatic Updates, go to http://update.microsoft.com. This update might cause your computer to restart.
For more information on this update, see the bulletin summary. For more information on how to protect your PC, visit the Microsoft Security At Home site.

Today’s e-mail had some different news about conferences. There was an announcement that Apple will not be giving the keynote or exhibit at Macworld.
I also had a call for speakers for MIX (actually it came yesterday but I was behind in e-mail).
I had another message asking if I want to present in a virtual conference.

I can somewhat see Apple’s point that they are reaching consumers in their stores and on the web. I also suspect that with the economy, availability of high quality training on the web, and slow maturing of the industry they may see the need to be at conferences as somehow diminished. I would tend to disagree. Although the number of people attending in-person events might be shrinking they tend to be the people who have a passion and can really help to drive your solutions forward.

I like the idea of virtual conferences because it allows me to present topics that are important and that I am passionate about and gives people the time to attend at times convenient to them. It reduces the interruption in their day-to-day duties and doesn’t incur the costs for travel.

The biggest reason I like live conferences is the ability to talk to the other people there. I may be different but I like to ask people at lunch what they learned and what they think. Getting a totally different perspective and having the ability to respectfully exchange views is something that I don’t usually find in the on-line learning venues.

It will be interesting to see how many people agree with me that there is a great value in being at the conference in person and will continue to support conferences or if they will go the way of the punch card.