A long time ago I wrote this post about Creativity & Innovation in products & service offerings in IT. Without repeating my other post; I mentioned that I find it interesting to see that big players in one area in the IT industry, such as Google in search and Microsoft in Windows & Office products start going away from their core competencies and offer additional products and services and move away from enhancing their core product (or so it seems to me anyway - not in all cases but in some) for instance, can anyone tell me what the latest major improvement / upgrade Google did to it's search engine??

I personally don't know if anything has changed to improve/change the search experience... Are we there yet? Is this really the best Google can do? Is this really the best Microsoft can do? Is this really the best Yahoo can do? Surely not, I'm sure there's a long way to go.

Anyway, to get to the point of this post: yesterday I came across Tafiti a beta service from Microsoft that offers a different way to search the web powered by the new Live Search. Despite the fact that it might need a little bit of getting used to, it's a cool way of searching IMHO, allows you to also bookmark your searches ...etc. Worth trying out I think.

Live Search itself has been upgraded to a new version (will post about this in more detail soon) I particularly like how they improved the advanced search options of Live Search.

So it looks like details are finally emerging on the 2008 Summer Road Trip, don't know what I'm talking about yet? read on...

You may have heard that Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 & Visual Studio 2008 are either already in RTM or will be so in 2008. Therefore you might want to start thinking about tuning in to the latest stuff and this is why the 2008 Summer Road Trip is here.

Darryl, Jeremy and Chris will be visiting the following cities on the specified date to talk to each community in the regions below about those three products.

The details are as follows.

The tour will include the following dates and locations:

• · Auckland – Feb 4
• · Tauranga – Feb 5
• · Hamilton – Feb 7
• · New Plymouth – Feb 8
• · Hawkes Bay – Feb 11
• · Palmerston North – Feb 12
• · Wellington – Feb 13
• · Nelson – Feb 14
• · Christchurch – Feb 15
• · Dunedin – Feb 18
• · Invercargill - Feb 19

I'll update the links to the above locations with more details when all information is updated.

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You can register for the event here

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So don't wait, get in soon, it's going to be the best road trip ever!

You can read more about the event at the following blogs: Will try to keep the list below updated as much as I can.

- Mauricio's Blog
- Darryl's Blog
- Chris's Blog
- Jeremy's Blog

More details will be coming soon, in the mean time, don't forget to register here

So it's been a week since Christchurch's first ever Code Camp, Boot Camp 2007, came to an end. It was an AWESOME couple of days. We were worried about the weather a day before the event due to forecast but it turned out to be fantastic!

We had a Boot Camp theme for this event as you know and speakers and helpers (the Boot Camp commanders) got to wear army look T-shirts and dog tags which I thought were really cool. The event had a total of 17 sessions spread over 2 streams presented by 13 speakers listed below, I've linked to the ones that I know have blogs so you can visit their blogs for information and resources if you like...

- Darryl Burling 
- John-Daniel Trask
- Pat Martin
- Nathan Mercer
- Andrew Tokely
- Edwin Dando
- Ivan Porto Carrero
- Jeremy Boyd
- Chris Crowe
- Ivan Towlson
- Bryn Lewis
- Adam Cogan
- Evan Williams

I will be posting more details about presentation slides ...etc soon. All attendees should receive an email with links ...etc over the next week. In the mean time, thanks to those of you who attended and those who helped and a BIG thanks to Peter for bringing code camp down to the south island ... It was a great event and we look forward to future ones.

The planning for the the first Code Camp in Christchurch is moving along pretty well but the main thing we need for this event to succeed is YOU, if you have not registered for the event already please do so. Below are updated details on the event.

TO REGISTER GO TO: http://www.codecamp.net.nz

Trimble Navigation, Birmingham Drive, Addington, Christchurch. Map here

Speakers are confirmed and sessions are close to finalised.

Chris Auld (Intergen, MVP)
Jeremy Boyd (Mindscape, MVP)
Darryl Burling (Microsoft)
Chris Crowe (Trimble, MVP)
Edwin Dando (Clarus)
Peter Jones (Intergen, MVP)
Bryn Lewis (Clarus)
Pat Martin (Microsoft)
Nathan Mercer (Microsoft)
Ivan Porto-Carrero (Xero)
Andrew Tokeley (Intergen)
Ivan Towleson (ECN Group)
John-Daniel Trask (Mindscape)
Evan Williams (HP)

View full speaker details here

We have plenty of sessions chock full of critical information.

View full session details here. (More coming soon).

AND ...
Free lunch
Spot Prize
Competitions
Camp Fire Dinner (Saturday night - about $30 each).
Lots more!

TO REGISTER GO TO: http://www.codecamp.net.nz

This is just a quick post to mention that Live Search 2.0 is here. Check it out it's being rolled out world wide but only seemed to arrive to NZ a couple of days ago. See the Live Search blog for more details.

I will be posting my thoughts on it soon.

I've had a play with the idea I suggested in my previous post about this topic and using the Facebook Developer Toolkit it was possible to get a lot of information out of Facebook and display those in a .NET application and you can also get info back in XML format so this should work well with a gadget. So far so good...

BUT the problem with using the toolkit or the Facebook API for that matter is authenticating your Facebook application user so you can get some info. For a web application you have to redirect to the Facebook login page let users login and then capture the authentication token... For having a Windows Live gadget I'm not sure yet how to do an alternative to this, would have been nice if there was an API method that lets you pass in login details for authentication...

Will have to think about a way to work around this so that I can carry on with my gadget development otherwise I'm not entirely sure this idea will work.

I've recently been made aware of a new site www.viawindowslive.com that provides a great place for developers to find resources about the Windows Live family of products. The site is still in the early days but more content is going in all the time, I've even started contributing some stuff myself and will be writing more stuff very soon.

Here's a brief description of the site taken from the about page

"Welcome to the Via Windows Live community space. This space is dedicated to you as a developer to help you build and understand how to utilise Windows Live technologies in your applications.  You'll find different sections on the various Live technologies and APIs that are currently available for software developers."

Information on the people behind Via Windows Live can also be found here

I've recently been wanting a lot to dig deeper into other areas of Windows Live that I don't know much about and get myself to learn more about these. Of course the hard thing in moving forward with that stuff aside from motivation is thinking of an idea of something that can be done.

I think I found an answer to that today! Here's something I'm going to try and see if I can do with or without help and I think it's a cool idea! One that will help me learn more about Windows Live Gadgets and also Facebook!

Here's the plan. I will attempt to get some data from Facebook and show this data on Windows Live and the idea is basically to allow you to see a little bit of your Facebook stuff on your Windows Live homepage.

- A couple of possibilities would be perhaps status updates of friends,notifications, and also showing who's online...

Sounds like an interesting project to work on, will see how it goes!

Some of you may have heard that Christchurch is about to have it's first CodeCamp ever and it's going to be a great event. Peter, Chris & Darryl have already blogged about it and now it's my turn. I was waiting on us confirming the venue and dates and now they have been confirmed, the event details are below.

Myself and Peter will be sending out speaker invitations this weekend so some of you should expect to hear from us soon So whether you want to present a session or just attend one then don't wait! Hurry up and head over to here for registration. We look forward to seeing you there.

I've previously blogged about Windows Live Custom Domains and POP3 support in my last two posts but didn't really talk much about setting it up. Thanks to Darryl's post I don't need to!

You can go read his full post but here's a quick summary of what you need to do.

- Register your own domain name if you don't have one
- Head to domains.live.com and sign in using a Windows Live ID/Passport
- Choose the Setup Windows Live Hotmail for my domain option
- Note the settings given by Windows Live Custom Domains for the MX/TXT records
- Head to your DNS provider and add a MX record and optionally the TXT record as given by Windows Live Custom Domains
- Go back to your Live Domains account and refresh
- Done!

Yep that's all you need to do, if you wish to use Outlook with your Windows Live Custom Domains account you will need the Outlook connector, see my previous post for more information on this.