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My Mum and Dad are visiting with us for 2 weeks. For some of that time they are taking the eldest 2 girls away to go and stay on a farm. Jude and I plan to have a night out with the other 2 being babysat!

In the meantime we are enjoying them being here!

Amit from Labnol discusses some of the reasons why 3rd Party PDF writer applications may not be as good as the full Adobe Acrobat offering.

The marketplace is flooded with non-Adobe PDF writers that promise to convert practically every file format into PDF.

Like Acrobat, you can install these third-party PDF generators [1, 2, 3] as virtual printers and create PDF files from any application that has the Print button. Some services go a step further - you send them a file as an email attachment and they'll mail it back to you as a PDF.

That's not all. WordPerfect and OpenOffice have in-built PDF printers. Microsoft released a free PDF add-in for all popular Office 2007 programs except Outlook. Then there are online suites like Google Docs and Zoho Office that allow you to save documents as PDF inside the browser without requiring any add-in.

Thanks to Christian Longstaff, I have signed up for (and already completed the first of) a series of free training events that will get me 2 things - first of all more understanding of how to construct ASP.NET 2.0 web pages and forms, and second a chance to get some pretty cool gear from Microsoft.

Note this is only valid for Registered Partners in the Microsoft Partner Program. Any developer who doesn't have a tech net subscription should think seriously about becoming a partner, if not only for the Action Pack. We use tens of thousands of dollars of Microsoft software for the princely sum of AUD$700 a year.

For example we run a SBS premium server including Sharepoint and Exchange, with 10 CALs around $3000, 7 pcs running Vista and Office 2007, 3 PCs running XP Pro and Office 2003, Applications like Visual Web Studio, SQL Server and Expression Web.

Simply follow the instructions on Darren's giveaway page to be in with a chance to win 2 20" Monitors.