It’s that time again: Linking to other Microsoft bloggers.

• Alphabet soup on the Office Communicator blog. Sample sentence: “OCPE uses AutoDiscover and EWS on the CAS servers.”
• Alfred Thompson points out that Microsoft Mathematics 4.0 is available for free download. It’s like a graphing calculator on steroids. (But the good kind of steroids.)
• Joseph Conway lists questions you shouldn’t call Microsoft for.
• Larry Osterman highlighted somebody who reinterpreted the MSPAINT.EXE file as sound data, then played it. (The author admitted to removing a long section of noise, which means you’re probably listening to the resources.)
• Eric Lippert (the technology blogger, not the professional golfer) takes a break from writing about programming languages to tell the story of a weird coincidence. The story reminds me of my own random-neighbor incident from the time before I burst onto the public stage with this Web site. I was chatting with a friend on the front lawn of the house he recently purchased, and a passer-by stopped by to say hello to the new neighbor on the street. My friend casually introduced me as “Raymond” but the remark drew no particular reaction. When the conversation concluded, the gentleman took his leave and headed back down the street, but he stopped, looked at me, then pointed at me with a sort of dawning realization, saying, “Hey, you’re Raymond Chen.”
• Steve Clayton shares some Out of office autoreplies he’s written. Lately, I’ve managed to make my OOF even shorter. Now it simply reads “Nice try.”
• On the Visual C++ Team Blog, Vaishnavi Sannidhanam explains how to file meaningful bugs against Visual C++. The products in question may have shipped, but the overall principles of bug reporting are still sound.
• The mysterious Hans VB points out that the Windows 7 User Experience Interaction Guidelines are available.
• Ingolfur Arnar Stangeland explains the difference between QFE/LDR and GDR hotfixes.
• Joseph Conway (yup the same Joseph Conway) looks at the hotfix installation process by answering the question Why are all the files not installed when you install a hotfix?