I'm Rob Marshall, a consultant who specialises in the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager product. I like to share, i do so by blogging and helping out when I can in the MS SMS newsgroups and participating in the ConfigMgr MVP program.
I was awarded and joined the program in 2009. It'd be an understatement to say it has to be one of the best experiences an IT engineer can have, if they really enjoy specialising in a product.
My biggest weapon for troubleshooting is, my formidable knowledge, no, only joking, you, the community. I find if I cannot answer a question, then I can usually find the answer from using Bing\Google, pouring over the documentation, and if that doesn't work, tinkering in mine or someone elses virtual lab.
The blogs pretty much about ConfigMgr, but it is also a platform for me to express my random urges to display something I've stumbled across, and that I imagine would entertain you or what not as equally as it did me.
Microsoft DreamSpark now provides professional-level Microsoft developer tools, at no charge, to High School students. Previously, these tools were only available to College and University students.
Back when I was programming, using IDE's, I had built in BASIC, DevPac for the Amiga and Turbo Pacal for the PC. When I look at what's available to teenagers now, the complexity of these tools, and what you could do with them, it makes me wonder how accessible they are for the average teen. I had my hands full understanding what look like primitive computers compared to todays standards. Now, they have on-hand help with links out to the help for more information, auto-completing IDE's with object pickers to write their code in, complex and powerful database and web server technologies to store and present things from. I'm sure if I about to switch on to computing at High School, with Microsoft giving this stuff away, I'd be absorbed by it totally.
Just look at this bundle of tools we can give the kids:
Worth passing this info on to Parents you know.
Check out Microsoft DreamSpark here
And a Q/A on DreamSpark from Microsoft PressPass