A message from our founder, James Crowley 

Early this year, Microsoft reached out to those of us in the UK tech community to join forces with them in taking part in the Microsoft UK Challenge event in June. The event consists of 3 packed days (complete with night stages too) out in the Cambrian mountains in Wales, all in aid of raising money for the NSPCC (you can donate here).

Team 'Cola Cubes' 

I've entered as part of the 'Cola Cubes' (don't ask!), alongside startup entrepreneurs in the London tech scene (Joshua March, Sam Mathews and Lucian Tarnowski) and two Microsoft colleagues (Will Thompson and Daniel Sol). We're competing alongside over 100 other teams, including some of our other community leader friends over at Vista Squad, VBUG and Sharepoint User Group. 

Each team completes various stages testing our running, cycling, kayaking, problem solving and strategy - requiring some fairly serious physical and mental fitness! We've been training since the start of the year, with 3 training weekends away, the last in the peak district giving us some taste of how painful hills out in the cambrian mountains are going to be!

Raising money for the NSPCC

Most importantly, this is all for a great cause - we're raising money for the NSPCC who do amazing work raising awareness of child cruelty, offering support to children and families whilst also lobbying for legislative change. Perhaps their most well known service is ChildLine - a free, 24-hour helpline for children in distress or danger.

Last year the event raised over £550,000 - so this is a huge event for them, and we hope this year we can help make it even more successful. 

In today's financial climate, it's tough to ask anyone for money - but sad fact is this is when charities really need it most.

You may not be able to offer much, but if everyone in our greatcommunity donated a token amount then between us we could raise a lot of money!

To sponsor us, simply visit this web page on the NSPCC site or you can find out more here.

If you would like to know more about Challenger sponsorship or wouldjust like to chat about the event itself please do e-mail me at james@developerfusion.com or catch me on twitter @jamescrowley.

Microsoft recently launched a new program called BizSpark to fill the void between their student and partner offerings. It's a generous offering targeted at start-ups offering Visual Studio System Team Suite + Team Foundation Server for the entire development team, plus production licenses for software-as-a-service hosting of Windows Server, SQL Server and BizTalk Server. Start-ups also get exposure through the BizSparkDB website.

Sound good? To be eligible for the program you need to meet the followingkey requirements are:

• Actively engaged in development of a software-based product that will form a core piece of your current or intended business. Note that this explicitly excludes start-ups in the business of providing services to others (such as hosting, web agencies, system integration or outsourced development)
• Privately held
• In business for less than 3 years
• Less than $1 million USD in annual revenue

To sign-up, you just need to find yourself a Network Partner who can get you on the scheme. And if you're reading this, you're in luck - because developerFusion is one! Just drop us a line and providing you meet the requirements we can send you a unique sign-up URL.

If you're not eligible, have no fear...

• Students (high school and college / university) can download loads of free software (including full versions of Visual Studio) - check out the DreamSpark program
• Businesses can also gain cheap software via the Empower ISV programme or Microsoft Action Pack

We've listed developer events on developerFusion for some time now, but we've just rolled out a bunch of features we think you'll love, and made it even easier to submit your event

Less form filling!

• List your event on developerFusion, and we'll push it out to Upcoming.org automatically, without you doing a thing.
• For Microsoft-related UK events, we'll also push it out on to the Microsoft MSDN and TechNet pages - this is the only way to get your community events published on the Microsoft site.
• If you've already listed your event on Upcoming.org, you can now enter the ID of your event on our event submission page and we'll pre-populate the fields for you!
• If you've got *loads* of events, we can automatically pull events in for you. We're already doing this for Microsoft, and groups including VBUG and NxtGen. Get in touch if you'd like to know more.

Stay up-to-date - and check your calendar for future events

• We've now improved the set of feeds we offer in our events section. You can now subscribe to the events feed straight into your Calendar app of choice (Outlook, Google Calendar etc).
• We're not just talking one feed either - you can subscribe to a specific technology (like .NET) or location (like London) or both!
• If you're just interested in a particular user group - or want to be able to provide an event feed on your own user group site, we offer feeds on our user group pages too.

• We mention a selection of community events in our regular newsletter - going out to over 40,000 developers worldwide. If your event isn't listed, you won't be mentioned!

Do let us know if there are other features you'd like us to include - we'd love to make it easier for you guys to discover events and submit events you're organising

Start-ups offer an amazingly unique environment in which to work, with a whole host of challenges - both technical and financial! That's why we decided we wanted to feature developers from technology start-ups, large and small, talking about the challenges they face day to day, and technical hurdles they've faced as the startups grow.

We've just published the first column on "Creating a culture of quality", from the senior developer at Huddle, Bob Gregory. Huddle is a start-up based in London, who obtained a $4M investment from the VC firm Eden Ventures late last year.

More startups on the way - if you'd like to take part, just get in touch!

Finally... we've got the first stage of our radical overhaul out there! Since starting work full-time on the site, we've had a long hard think about how we can better serve the developer community, and have made some major changes to the site as a result:

• Enable local connections - the world is a big place, and sometimes nothing beats finding out what's going on right on your doorstep, and meeting developers within miles from where you live. Our new community section aims to let you connect with developers in your area (or somewhere else entirely!), discuss local issues and discover events at which you can meet and network with them in person.
• Tap into the developer community at large - 2 brains are better than one, right? (well, most of the time)... so we figured our forums were due for a massive overhaul, to help you more easily tap in to the thousands of brains all over the world that use developerFusion every day. We've made it faster and easier to post your questions, and more importantly get them answered.
• Continue to provide great quality technical content. We want to broaden the range of topics we talk about, and how we talk about them - in addition to articles, we'll be including columns from real-world developers and start to grow a new collection of video tutorials and podcasts - so we've got a whole spectrum of ways for you to keep on top of the latest technologies.
• Keep you up to date with the latest developer-focused news. 
• Reward our members - you guys rock! That's why we're going to give out loads of free stuff (supported by our kind sponsors). The more you participate, the more chances you'll have of winning our monthly prizes, plus an extra special prize for our top contributor each month. We'll also be keeping you updated on the latest discounts and offers we've negotiated for software and events all around the world.

We can't hope to get it right first time, but we hope we've made a good first step. The site is going to be continuously evolving, and we'd love to hear your feedback.

• What works well, what doesn't?
  
• What does the developer community at large need to continue to thrive?
  
• What can we do to support it?

James Crowley
Founder

The 'Future of Web Apps' conference is back in London for the 8-10th October, and we've teamed up with the guys at Carsonified to give you a special discount rate on ticket. It's got a great line-up this year, with the usual mix of speakers from startups and the big names - including digg, Facebook, Huddle, Dopplr, Revision3.

If that sounds like you sort of thing, you can get

• 10% off the conference ticket - just enter "FOWA - Conf - ITPro" as the promotional code
• Free entry to the expo - just enter "FOWA-EXpo-ITPro" as the promotional code

To find out more, go to www.futureofwebapps.com/2008/london

As part of our impending re-launch, we decided it was time to smarten ourselves up a little! We've also tweaked our name a little (spaces and capital D's are overrated)

Now all we've got to do is finish the smart website to go with it!

There's some news I'd like to share with you all that I'm pretty excited about! 

As some of you will know, developerFusion has been around for a while - I first founded the site way back in '99 (then known as VB Web). The site has grown enormously since then, and I've been delighted with its success so far - for the last year or two we've been serving well over half a million developers each and every month. It was a challenging balancing game when the site was simply being run as a part-time hobby out of a back room. While we've kept the quality content coming, the site was still falling a long way short of it's potential - and particularly in how we can support the wider developer community as a whole.

But no longer! As of a week ago, I've packed in my day job in order to focus 100% on Developer Fusion. There's going to be loads of changes in the coming months. Hopefully some of them you'll find real value in, and will truly make Developer Fusion the #1 community out there. I'm looking forward to the challenge!

James Crowley
Founder