Quirky News Review of 2007

Not surprisingly, the year 2007 started with January. Microsoft and Ford launched SyncMyRide.com during the Detroit auto show. SYNC now has the commercial that always makes me chuckle - the one with the "Play artist Tiffany" line.

Voice recognition made headlines again in early February as Sebastian Krahmer's idea for a remote Vista exploit began to circulate. The idea is to record spoken, malicious commands into a media file on the web and see if an unsuspecting user will play the file while Vista's speech recognition is running. I think the biggest threat is from the inside, though. Picture a disgruntled contractor sprinting through the maze of cubicles shouting "FORMAT CEEE COLON".

In March I won an XBOX 360 at the MVP summit edition of Party with Palermo. I'd say my favorite games this year included Command and Conquer and the games inside the Orange Box.

April was a busy month – three months jammed into one, really. Microsoft dropped bombshells about Silverlight running managed code on the client, Moonlinght running on Linux, and the DLR running Ruby and Python code. Meanwhile, Paul Graham said Microsoft is dead and Charles Petzold said prose is dead.

In May, Microsoft went from the Tablet PC to the Table Sized PC, and then released the legal hounds on TestDriven.Net.

In June, Bill Simser named his daughter Vista just as a microscopic photograph is found on retail Vista DVDs.

In July, the rumors started that Microsoft would buy FaceBook for $6 billion.

August brought good news – Microsoft settled a patent infringement suit with Eolas that gets rid of "click to activate this control" in Internet Explorer. No more silly workarounds.

September –Fellow co-author Phil Haack joins Microsoft. Halo 3 launches to near riots.

October – Rob Conery joins Microsoft. MSFT invests $240 million in Facebook. The first Alt.Net conference is held.

November – Zune 2 updates hit the street. If only the phone companies could work this same magic.

December - Emacs.Net is all I can say.