Grab Yourself a .NET Nugget

One of my last passing shots as I left the UK for Redmond was to put forward an idea for producing short nuggets of 5-10 minutes of on-demand technical content. It's my assertion as a developer that most of us love clear, concise, spin-free technical information on practical aspects of .NET development, but the webcast model of hour long presentations requires a distraction-free environment and plenty of patience which I know I don't have myself.

Well my ex-colleagues back at Microsoft UK have done an awesome job of turning this embryonic idea into reality. Mike Ormond, Mike Taulty and Mike Pelton (as a non-Mike, I was always a misfit in the UK developer community team!) have delivered the first six nuggets and they’re fantastic. The first six topics are as follows:

Visual Studio

• Anchoring and Docking in Windows Forms (streaming, download)
• Getting the most out of the Windows Forms Property Grid (streaming, download)
• Working online / offline with the PAG Offline Block (streaming, download)

SQL Server 2005

• Managing .NET assemblies in the database (streaming, download)
• Writing stored procedures in .NET managed code (streaming, download)
• Writing user defined functions in .NET managed code (streaming, download)

If you've got a couple of moments to spare, check out the MSDN Nuggets page. The Mikes inform me that they've got a number of these in the pipeline and that they're planning to release several each week, so it's worth checking back every now and again. Great job, guys!