today we announced a program to help technology startups around the world incubate ideas and drive innovation forward. instead of rehashing everything the bizspark site says, go there now and see if you qualify then get all signed up. you can also check out microsoftstartupzone.com for more information.

coming right back from some relaxation i jumped right into our central region dpe (developer & platform evangelism) off-site in my new hometown of chicago. i think it was good for me to come into the off-site with some relaxation under my belt since the three days were jam packed and i felt exhausted after each one.

the one thing i do enjoy out of these off-sites is the ability to talk to incredibly smart people that i normally do not get a chance to talk to very often because we are all spread across 18 states within the central region of the us. these off-sites are mostly about figuring out how we can be more successful in achieving our commitments. the emphasis this time really seemed like cross-teaming which i love (there was also the extremely fun team ride on segways).

all-in-all the off-site was a success and i feel slightly drained sitting here in the loop office, but i know there is work to be done and a community to serve. so, back to business for me.

i spent the past couple days with good friend and colleague, larry clarkin, going through some final thoughts on our community plan for this year (msft fiscal started beginning of july). these are the times that are most challenging since we really have to be precise on what we think we can work with the community to do throughout the year. i find myself saying "this is stupid" and "i am gonna punch this spreadsheet in the face" quite a bit during this time.

what is not stupid is the end result that comes from putting all this hard work into a plan. it is about ensuring we are putting the right resources in the right places to better serve the community of developers we so love. that same community provides to us feedback throughout this process so that we are not making decisions without their best interest in mind. that is the part i love.

what i hate are spreadsheets. i am a developer and i love to code so unless i am building some sweet ass obas, then keep me out of excel. it is the necessary evil that keeps us on track and not all over the place throughout the year, so i can't complain too much (although i am).

the beginning of the fiscal year is always stressful. being at microsoft for over 3 years now, you would think i would be used to it, but i am not. so that is why i go dark around this time of year with my family on a beach in the outer banks with limited access to just about anything but sand and ocean. however, someday i will learn to leave the laptop at home and let the email build. but until that day comes, gorbett is still open for business.

while i was filling my brain with technical goodness at techready, our internal training event, i had a brief opportunity to sit down with scott guthrie (i was seriously debating on whether to link back to his profile cuz' if you don't know who scott guthrie is, shame on you :)) before he rushed off back to his family.

i was actually taping a podcast for thirsty developer so the audio on the video is not great (since i did not want to mess around with mixing the recorded audio with the video). actually the video is not great either since i did not bring a tripod and had my camera sitting on a pillow on an ottoman and it clearly sunk (remind me to yell at my boss for not getting me some good video gear).

even with the poor equipment setup, the video was still worthwhile to post alongside the thirsty developer podcast (which also contains another chat i had at techready, but i will save that for a different post). it really is amazing that a corporate vice president at msft can be so down to earth and understand the community that he serves. it also helps that he is wicked smart too!

there is nothing cooler than seeing a bunch of local students completely awed by the technology that is microsoft surface. i was participating in the american competiveness summit here in chicago and the best part was watching these totally amazed kids react to surface. click the video above for part 1 and i will be encoding and uploading part 2 in a few.

in case you have been living in a box, ie 8 beta has been released and is a must-have for web developers and designers. first, it is totally rocking a standard compliant browser out of the box (or web). that means that some of the sites you may have developed prior to ie 8 may have to be reworked to be standards compliant. you will be surprised to see how many sites are not there yet (including some of our own properties). don't worry though... ie 8 has a much needed "Emulate IE7" button that you will find you are turning on for most of your browsing.

besides having all kinds of great new features (activities, webslices, etc.), it includes some crazy cool developer tools that soon became part of my design and development experience.

here is an example. i have been working on a cool new project (this is really what i do in my spare time... nice life... i know) modifying some already cool html, css, and xaml code. however, i wanted to make some real adjustments to not only functionality, but design. it turns out that it can get pretty complicated in design when you are dealing with hundreds of nested css tags.

well, the magic comes in when you launch the ie 8 developer tools and realize just how much power there is in using them on a site. i am not even going to get into the javascript debugging built into the tools (yah... real javascript debugging with an immediate window and all). you can read all about that here.

i was struggling with div positioning and size on the site i am working on and found just how easy it is to find where elements are and what they are set to. so i put the ie 8 developer tools to use. simply click on the developer tools icon in the upper right corner and click the arrow cursor in the developer tools toolbar and select an element in the browser window. see below all the information that is given to me, including what style was affecting the layout i needed to change. sweet!

but it gets even better. you can actually change html values right in the developer tools window and watch your site modify in real-time. that is way cool. say a width attribute in your html is 800px and it is not looking right. right within the developer tools, you can change the value and watch the width change as you make changes to the value. super sweet!

so if you are a developer and/or a designer looking to make site design and development easier, i highly recommend downloading ie 8 to both check your sites for standards compliance  and take advantage of the new developer tools included in the install. and remember, you always have the "Emulate IE7" button.