If you’ve installed Office 2007 yet, you’re probably aware of the new preview feature in Outlook. By default all Office attachments can be previewed inside Outlook. Thanks to Ryan Gregg you can now preview PDF documents as well. Go check it out!

Because of circumstances outside our control, we had to postpone the NNUG meeting that where scheduled for 27th March. The meeting will be rescheduled to after Easter, with the same agenda. An exact date will be sent out to everybody next week. Sorry guys!

You've probably all seen this already, since you read Scott Guthrie’s blog as well (or that you’ve been on the internet after 2005), but he just posted a few examples of some of the new features in the C# Orcas framework. I can't wait to start using the automatic properties! I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent writing stupid get/set properties that only do one thing, return a private field.

You might argue that it was about time some of these features got implemented or that they (MS) are just stealing from other languages. To be honest I don’t care as long as the language gets better and more productive to use.

If you want to see the “complete” spec for C# features, you can check out this document: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/8/6/5868081c-68aa-40de-9a45-a3803d8134b8/csharp_3.0_specification.doc

Great news! We have invited Christian Weyer from ThinkTecture to speak at NNUG in Oslo, Bergen and Kristiansand. I’m really looking forward to this. Christian is a well known speaker and especially known for his excelent expertise in SOA.

I had the opportunity to see him talk at TechEd in Barcelona last year, and this guy really knows his stuff. Come to our meeting in Bergen at May 30th and please tell all your friends and co workers!  For those of you not living in Bergen, he will also talk in Oslo the 29th and Kristiansand the 31st. More info will be available at NNUG later.

Jamie Cansdale over at TestDriven.NET had a rather strange experience with Microsoft lately. Check out what they sent him:

I’m contacting you to ask if you would like to be considered for an MVP Award in recognition of your contributions to technical communities over the past year.

And then:

Vicki Collins (Brook Street) would like to recall the message, "Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award"

Check out the full story at his blog.

Last night after I finished my Scrum presentation at NNUG, John St. Clair (architect at Reaktor and board member of NNUG) came up to me and asked if I’ve heard about Office RoundTable? As truth is, I hadn’t and asked what it was?

He thought that since we at Contiki have distributed teams it might be interesting for us. He explained that it was a 360 cam for Microsoft Live Meeting and it had auto focus on the person talking. Next thing I know he’s showing me a demo of it, which you’ll find here. But I think this one is a better demo of the device, though not that fancy.

Since I saw this, only one thing has been going through my mind; we just got to get us one of these! It would just make our day so much simpler. And not only that, it’s not as expensive as I initially feared. Just below $3000. Only sad thing is that it’s not for sale yet. Someone told me it might be for sale in Q2 this year though.

Thanks John for an excellent tip!