Adam Field says Microsoft bloggers rock. That warms my heart, but the reason he gives is worthy of a link. Sean Alexander had given him tons of tips on Windows Media Maker. Later Sean points us to even more resources that he learned about from a commenter on his blog.

I love watching conversations like this. It's how marketing is changing one customer at a time (with 3000 or so of you watching from the sidelines).

In a few hours I'll be leaving for O'Reilly's ETech. There are a ton of blogs coming out of ETech. When I want to keep up with a ton of blogs on a particular topic, I build a search feed at Feedster. Here's one for ETech.

I'm going to start a new weblogging pattern tonight. I'm going to try to keep my blog down to six posts or less. I was thinking of doing one essay, with links to five sites. That's going to be really hard to do. But, I'll try for a while. For one it'll make me really think about each link I put here. For instance, do I link to ego stuff, like this CNET/Japan link which is driving a bit of traffic my way tonight? (Can anyone translate that?) Or, do I link to something PRish, like this link to Puget Sound's Business Journal about Microsoft's Greenhouse project (which is designed to help cultivate new software ideas?

I guess I should count those links, along with the other five links I already made tonight. I'm already over my budget. Like I said, this is going to be hard. But, it's a goal, not a rule.

Why am I doing that? Cause the blogs I admire don't ramble on all night, and I have to find a way to keep some balance in the process too or else my wife or my coworkers will string me up. Not to mention that webloggers are joking about their news aggregators smoking (yes, I am a stress test for news aggregators I'm told) and like Jorgen Thelin says: "Here's the [keep up with Scoble] dilemma - do I try to get them all (keep up with the flood), or just run for my life?" Not to mention Jesse Ezell's analysis of click through to mine and Chris Sells' blogs. (which could be explained by the expectation that everyone is already reading me, after all far more people subscribe to me, according to Feeds.scripting.com, than Sells).

So, let's give this a try for a while, shall we? It's really challenging to read 1282 feeds and narrow the world down to five killer links. Speaking of which, who is that Matthew Mastracci guy and how can he possibly keep up with 1368 feeds? :-)

Dave Winer visited Microsoft today. We presented to the .NET Developer's Association and gave a quick run-through of RSS. Got lots of questions. Hopefully some people blog the meeting. Tim Jarrett blogged a bit about Dave's 3 p.m. meeting at MS Research. So did Korby Parnell and Joshua Allen.

A good demoer can make you feel like you could go home and be world class at what they are teaching you. Robert Green of the Visual Basic team was just onstage here at the .NET Developer's Association showing off new features of Whidbey, the next version of Visual Studio.net.

It was enough to make me give up my dreams of being a C# programmer. I am still struggling through the early stages of learning to program. The next version of Visual Basic has so many things that will help me become proficient enough that I'm convinced it's the way for me to go.

I haven't really paid attention to Visual Basic for the past 24 months. I'll be honest. I wrote off Visual Basic. I thought it was a "has been" product. You know, one of those Microsoft products like Outlook Express that lots of people use but that haven't really seen any real innovations for a while.

Tonight I saw how Green used pre-done snippets to get things done quick -- and which teach you how to program to boot. That, and new form design features (aligning text labels to text input boxes is a snap now) and edit-and-continue editing (you don't need to take your eyes off of your code to debug it anymore) and pre-compilation code errors (it underlines errors and gives you suggestions) tell me Visual Basic.NET is coming back.

Thanks Robert for the inspiration!

Anita Rowland blogged the meeting. So did Jim Blizzard (with photo) and Wesner Moise and also Brian Lutz who echoed my observations of Robert Green's skill: "My jaw nearly dropped when I saw that this task that had proved the source of so much frustration had been reduced nearly down to a simple drag-and-drop."