My friend, colleague, and fellow alumnus, Kilong Ung is featured in an article titled "Fearless, Now" in the Reed College magazine. Kilong is a Cambodian refugee who survived the Khmer Rouge genocide and escaped through the infamous Killing Fields. From a refugee camp in Thailand, he eventually came to live in Portland as a high school student, and later graduated from Reed College in mathematics.

I worked with Kilong at Corillian for about half a year before we figured out we are both Reedies, both in mathematics, albeit at different times. Kilong is a relentless civic activist and motivational speaker, and he is working on a memoir, Golden Leaf, to be published in 2009. I encourage you read the article about Kilong and be inspired by his story.

Luca Bolognese has put together a .NET library of financial functions which is now available on CodeGallery on Microsoft. His goal was to replicate the financial functions in Excel, right or wrong. And if you think that Excel got a function wrong, he invites you to contribute a different implementation.

Luca implemented the library in F#. The library is available in two forms, one which statically links to F# (so that you don't need to redistribute F#) and one that doesn't (which is correspondingly smaller). Luca gave an outstanding talk on F# at PDC2008, which is well worth checking out.

Brian Randell, Microsoft MVP on Team System, announced that he's put together new VSTS virtual machines for Microsoft, and they're available for download. The previous VSTS VMs are set to expire at the end of 2008; the new ones expire at the end of 2009. Additionally, all the components have been updated to recent versions.

There are four VM images to choose from. You can select an "all-up" image with Team Foundation Server (TFS), Team Build, Team Explorer, and Team Suite, or a "TFS-only" image with TFS, Team Build, and Team Explorer only. Each of those comes in two flavors: one compatible with Virtual PC 2007 and Virtual Server 2005 R2, and one compatible with Hyper-V. As Brian says, "Download the ones that make you happy!"

See Brian's post for the details and download links. Thanks, Brian!

A story on NPR's All Things Considered considers if cloud computing will work in the White House.

Both Google and Microsoft are lobbying the Obama transition team to adopt cloud computing to get work done in the White House. In the story, security expert Kevin Jackson discusses how cloud computing can make data and computing more secure than traditional systems. It would also improve collaboration, an area that government is particularly bad at. Vince Cerf, the so-called father of the Internet, who now works at Google, opines that cloud computing would also be a good paradigm for the new administration to help achieve the new openness that has been championed.

Sara Ford has posted Visual Studio Tip of the Day #382 as the final tip in her popular 17 month series. From its introduction to yesterday's graceful exit, Sara has brought Visual Studio into sharp focus for a vast number of developers. Each post begins with a personable "Did you know..." and no matter how much I thought I knew about Visual Studio, often, no, I didn't know that.

Did you know... that the popular tips series was a labor of love (translation: not what she gets paid for), a gift to the developer community?

Mining her blog, Sara brought these golden nuggets out in book form this fall,  Microsoft Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity (Microsoft Press, 2008).

And did you know... that all of the author's proceeds from the book go to help send Hurricane Katrina survivors to college?

Now Sara will be turning her attention to other ways to engage with the community, including her day job on CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting website. I cannot wait to see what's next.

We stand on the sandy shore and wave a fond farewell to the Visual Studio Tip of the Day series as it slips over the horizon. Adieu!

So long, and thanks for the all the tips!

I wasn't able to attend last weekend's WhereCampPDX, an unconference on all things geographical. I find the current Stuart v1.0's inability to be in two places at the same time to be overly restrictive. I'll have to work on a time-travel upgrade or cloning technology or something.

That meant that I missed real-life Pac Man on the streets of Portland. What a concept! It turns out that some grad students in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications program started the idea with Pac Manhattan, running through the streets around Washington Square Park in Manhattan. Each real-life player (Pac Man and the ghosts) is paired with a controller back in a game room, and players and controllers are in constant contact via cell phone communicating location and status.

WhereCampPDX transported the game to Portland's Park Blocks. Now you can watch the video of Jason Mauer in interview and in action as the Pac Man. Wild, man!

Get your party self down to Party with Palermo on Sunday night before PDC08. Join your affable host, Jeffrey Palermo, for great company and conversation, free food and drink, swag and more from 7:00 to 10:00 PM at Casey's Irish Bar & Grill in Los Angeles. The price of admission is one business card.

Don't throw an exception! RSVP so that Jeff knows you're coming.

Seattle Code Camp v4.0 is coming up on the weekend of November 15–16, 2008 at the prestigious DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington. Register now and make your plans to be there.

Code Camps are community-driven events, un-conferences really, with everything that's good about a conference (like great content) and none of the bad (like costing money). Code Camp is free, it happens on weekends, there's no marketing fluff or sponsor agenda to push. Its all about coders talking to coders about writing code. And it is absolutely not limited to Microsoft technology. Recent code camps have been picking up a broad range of topics — basically if it involves code then it's "game on." Contribute to the community by submitting a session today.

Code Camp is a great opportunity to sample tools and technologies that you might not be exposed to in your day job, or to dive deep on a topic with someone who knows where you are coming from. Code Camp is also one of the best opportunities to get started with talking tech in public. It's a warm, friendly crowd of people who share your passion about coding.

I'll be giving a Whirlwind Tour of C# 2.0 and 3.0, looking at all the features introduced since C# 1.0 that change the way you program. It's a fast-paced Lessig-style talk, whipping through 300 slides (okay, some of them only have one word on them : ) and a demo in an hour plus change. I may present another topic as well, but I thought I'd wait and give other people a turn to sign up as well.

My friend and fellow Microsoft MVP, Roman Kiss, has published an article on CodeProject this month describing the design and implementation of a WCF extension for exporting WSDL documentation (<wsdl:documentation>) and XSD annotation (<xs:annotation>) elements in your contract.

Roman is the author of some three dozen other articles on CodeProject, including the popular Null Transport for WCF which describes a custom in-process transport for WCF. If you are deep in WCF and don't know Roman's excellent work, take some time to acquaint yourself with his wealth of knowledge.

The Data Dude, a.k.a. Gert Drapers, Architect and Development Manager for Visual Studio Team System Database Edition, has a pair of posts on his blog discussing the recent announcement that VSTS Database Edition is merged into VSTS Development Edition, effective 1 October 2008. Two SKUs are now one. Here are the Dude's posts.

• Team Developer + Team Data = Team Developer!
• More Team Developer + Data Edition Merge Information

The posts include links to the announcement and an FAQ page, as well as some good discussion.

I consider this to be excellent news! Thanks to the VSTS team for making this change!