Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference has just wrapped up and I've decided to run through an account of what happened and some of the major announcements that have been made.

I've strayed outside of Google only a couple of times in my professional career as a programmer, and every time I've raced back shivering and scared at how bad the world is outside of Google's house. When it comes to programming related queries, it's amazing at how unhelpful search engines can be. With the launch of Bing, I've crept outside once again, and I can proudly report that it doesn't suck as much as I expected.

Lately I've been doing a lot of work with Notepad++ and Subversion, however I was surprised to find that there are no plugins available that integrate the two. At least, no plugins Google could easily find for me. Due to the nature of my project, a lot of commits are required, and I was wasting a lot of time switching between Notepad++ and Windows Explorer in order to commit changes. Being a software engineer, I figured out a good solution: I'll write my own Subversion plugin for Notepad++.

Geeks are notoriously difficult to shop for, and programmers are some of the biggest geeks around. Below are a few options that a typical code slinger might enjoy unwrapping this holiday season.

Last week was Adobe Max, the biggest Adobe conference. This is always the event where Adobe announces all of their fun and interesting projects. They usually go over any product updates also, as they did this year with the CS4 suite. I wasn't lucky enough to get to go this year but the web is a wonderful place where I was able to keep up with it. The one issue is that it is sometimes hard to find the good stuff and this is the reason for this post.

I have had the pleasure to be one of the first authors for a new Adobe Flex Magazine that aims at being a quarterly published journal about Flex. The magazine is the first, to my knowledge, dedicated solely to developing with Flex. Each of the issues will have specialty focus with this first issue discussing Adobe AIR. House of Fusion is the force behind the magazine and already has a ColdFusion magazine, Fusion Authority, under their belt. The magazine has a very capable Editor-in-Chief, Jeffry Houser - flex fanatics out there might know him from The Flex Show, a Flex focused podcast.

When it comes to Microsoft products lately, many don't count a product released until the 1st service pack. Well, for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, the wait is over. Personally, I've been using Visual Studio 2008 since they were in beta and I contest it's still one of the best IDE's on the planet. The service pack adds some bug fixes and new features that are sure to make most .NET developers happy.

When it comes to web-based technologies, we here at Switch On The Code always try to stay on top of things. When Microsoft announced IE8, I took no time at all downloading, installing, and playing with it. I haven't used every new feature yet, but here's a rundown of my first impressions of the new browser.

Today at Mix08 Microsoft made some big announcements; the one that we are most interested in is the release of Silverlight 2.0 Public Beta. This is a very exciting time to be web developer, especially if your focus is heading towards RIAs (Rich Internet Applications). We have talked recently about some of the cool features that are going to be in Silverlight 2.0.

If you've haven't heard about Silverlight 2.0 yet, you're probably living in a dark corner of the world. Just in case you need a refresher, you can check some posts about it here, and here, and here, and here, and pretty much any other developer news site.