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!