Microsoft has started a new developer center at MSDN called Coding for Fun. It’s geared toward hobbyist programmers and people wanting to start coding. This is an interesting approach that Microsoft has taken, especially with the releasing of the “express” products (VB.Net Express, C# Express, etc) as free development environments. There are not many articles on the site currently, but a few. They even have a few articles that will help you start game design (working with DirectX).
While I’ve been looking at the Beta 2 of VS.Net 2005 I have come across Tracepoints. These are a seriously cool debugging feature! Check out this post on them (posted last July….wow, am I behind).
You can now pick up the Beta1 Pre-Release Candidate of Avalon and Indigo on the MS Download Center (RSS). This version was built using the Whidbey Beta 2 bits, so everything should be good to go to just dive right in! According to a blogger from MS these are the bits that will go live with Longhorn unless some really nastiness is found. FYI: There is also another related download in case you want to try out the MSMQ queued channels with Indigo.