More Free Books Strikes Again! Only valid Feb 19th-25th

So, Incase you’ve been missing this whole trend of Free MS Press Books – Here it is again!

And incase you’ve never seen this pretty logo of it I’ll kick off with it.

Free Microsoft Press E-Book Offer!

It’s literally this simple, go to a page, click a link, and BAM! (after signing in) books downloaded!

What’s on the Agenda for late Feb you may ask?

Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! Windows Vista Resource Kit, Second Edition

Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!
By Patrice Pelland  
Download here!

Windows Vista Resource Kit, Second Edition
By Mitch Tulloch, Tony Northrup, and Jerry Honeycutt with the Windows Vista Team
Download here!

Be careful about the Vista one, I’ve been having trouble downloading it, so you may experience that as well.

Also FYI: I download every one of these books not only to make sure the links work, but seriously.. free books? I OWN a number of these books in paper form, and I love digital!

This offer only valid Feb 19th through Feb 25th, so download today!

FreE-Books before the 25th! IPv6 and Secure Core for the Holidays

As always, thank you ever so much Joanne Lin (MS) !

For those of you who saw the last Free E-book deal from Microsoft Press, it is back again with another stringent timeline to get it!

You have until December 24th to download these beauties!

With a simple ‘click’ and ‘register’ you can have these two Beautiful E-Books downloaded and in your possession for reading and excitement!

Understanding IPv6, by Joseph Davies

Writing Secure Code for Vista, by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc

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If you’re even remotely interested in these technologies, free stuff, books, reading, future certification and anything else – this is the deal for you!

To keep up to date of deals like this, you can subscribe to the Microsoft Press Connection Newsletter.

Happy Holidays, and this gift is wrapped and ready for Christmas and Hanukkah!

The Spirit of Giving Vista Giveaway award winner!

Hey everyone who participated in this contest, I want to thank you and I appreciate your interest in getting some of the many things I have so you can use any benefit from them!

After tallying the responses when I closed the contest this Friday, and running it through my random ‘winner’ picker, we have a winner! Brian J. Greenberg is indeed our official winner!

Brian’s Blog found here will be the bearer of this, and special thanks to his tweet on twitter from @bjgreenberg.

So, the next contest will be announced on Monday, either for a Zune, a copy of Vista (32bit) or who knows… but that is my plan for kicking it off on Monday (hopefully, if life doesn’t happen!;))

Thanks, and the determination of how long to keep the contest open is derived based upon the number of entries divided by the number of hits/interest, so I look forward to the next one!

Thanks everyone!

Christopher – @cxi

The Spirit of Giving contest ends this Friday! (And other prizes!)

Those of you who have already entered into This is the spirit of giving! Get your Vista on-! Free Giveaways! that is great! If you haven’t entered yet, go post your comment, tweet, digg or whatever for your chance to win those two books and a copy of Vista Ultimate!

The holidays are not over yet! There will be some more prizes for the winning over the next week or so, including: Another copy of Vista (32bit only), a Zune and who knows what else I have in store (Seriously, I don’t even know yet!) (Oh, and a copy of Norton 360) and whatnot!

So, go get your prize on! Comment (Here, there or everywhere) and lets make the running for these prizes a decent one! I’ll stop giving away if I don’t get any interest?!

Oh, who wants some Windows Server 2003 Enterprise 25user Cal! (I still have a bunch of those! :)) (And may have some Microsoft Exam vouchers to give away soon!)

Happy Holidays!

@cxi

Windows FireStarter (virtual) Conference on Dec. 12th

Totally hijacked from Dave Bost @ The Mind of a Developer Evangelist

On December 12th, the Microsoft Evangelist team on the West Coast is hosting a (virtual) Windows FireStarter event. This is a great chance for developers to learn “straight from the horses mouth” (so to speak) guidance, best practices and tips&tricks for building applications on top of the Windows platform.

They are holding this FireStarter event *LIVE!* in Redmond, but they are also streaming it live online to the rest of the world.

This would be a great opportunity to secure a conference room for the day, post the agenda around your office, and join us live on December 12th. I’ll see if we can also open up an IRC channel or something to carry the communication online during the sessions.

Be sure to register for online participation or if you can happen to be in Redmond on the 12th, you can participate in-person. Seats are limited!

Agenda: (all times are PST)

8:30 – 8:45, Kick off, Mithun Dhar

8:45 – 9:30, Keynote/Why Vista!, Chris Henley

9:30 – 10:45, The Case of the Unexplained, Mark Russinovich

11:00 – 12:15, Building Differentiated UI Applications Using Composite WPF, Glenn Block, Bob Brumfield & David Hill

1:00 – 2:00, Best Practices for Developing for Windows for Windows Standard User, Crispin Cowan

2:00 – 3:00, Windows Security and Bitlocker, Byron Hynes

3:15 – 4:00, (Windows 7 + Windows Server 2008 R2) Teaser Session, Byron Hynes

4:00 – 5:00, Windows for everyone!

 

I highly encourage you check this out if any of this applies to you, especially Windows 7, Server 2008, Mark Russinovich, AppDev, Security.. any of it!

Also, be sure to check out Dave’s Blog and the Thirsty Developer, by far one of the most consumable podcasts (which just happens to be about development and architecture!)