Channel 9 – A Community for developers and users

With so much video available from so many sources how do you choose what you are going to watch? I know it’s hard but I keep up with most the content that interests me by using iTunes to collect the Podcasts or going directly to the content provider’s site to access the information. Microsoft has created several “communities” that contain information about products, how to use them and discussions of projects and events surrounding the software giant. Channel 9 is one of those communities. One way of keeping up with new content coming from this site is to subscribe to its RSS feed. If you are new to RSS and the ability to have site postings sent to you automatically then you are in for a real treat.

For a quick overview of the Channel 9 Website can be found in this video:

http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/ch9/2944/562944/ThisWeekC9July23_ch9.mp4

Channel 9 was developed for those that want to dig a bit deeper into the Microsoft Product Line. Some of its content is on a lighter note but you can find more in depth information on Azure, Silverlight, SharePoint and other applications. If you wanted to know how to work with template libraries or use PivotViewer all these kinds of subjects are available. What is nice about these posts and video tutorials is that they also give you more resources to follow up on if you need to dig deeper into the subject. A recent video short that I watched had a segment showing the merging of a spreadsheet database into Publisher to create a catalog from the catalog template in Publisher. A hyperlink was added to the post that goes into greater depth on how the merge process works, how to work with the different field characteristics that you want to merge (like a picture link), and adjusting the catalog merge area to your desired result. Really great stuff if you are interested in producing a catalog for this purpose.

Now I freely admit that a lot of this content is above my head, I haven’t been programming for a while, but there is a lot here that you can pick from that will help you out a great deal. So don’t be afraid to dig right in to it!