http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?q=microsoft.*&sel=&qt_d=Directory+Search

has a list of what you can get at from google's interface.  There's quite a few, including ones for Visual Studio and the Visual languages.  You have search the Microsoft web-site though to find any details.  You probably try connecting to news.microsoft.com or nntp.microsoft.com and see if Outlook Express finds anything.

(there is an RSS feed though for each forum - look for the orange XML near the bottom of the thread page)