I originally blogged about the local dev center last July when I heard that Microsoft was opening it here in Vancouver.
A lot of this Vancouver / Canada startup / tech hub topics I'm now blogging about on the Bootup Labs blog, which you should follow if you're interested in those topics: Bill Gates talks on NPR about the Vancouver development center
New cellphone
Sending free SMS from a website
Residential VoIP in Canada: Not looking so good
50 places to see before you die
Dropbox vs. JungleDisk
Standing Cloud makes cloud hosting an app container