The Australian and New Zealand SharePoint Conferences are JUST around the corner. These events are organised by a dedicated group of NZ and AUS Community Leaders and MVP’s - Debbie Ireland, Mark Rhodes, Nick Hadlee, Mark Orange, James Milne and Kathy Hughes.  Once again, the team are organising...

Aussie developer Yann Duran has just published his second Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 extension. The Luminous Controls extension is currently a TextBlock and a GroupLayout control. This is the second LightSwitch extension Yann's published, the first being Luminous Themes. He's in the process of writing...

Update (12 Sep) All of the session videos are now up and the high-quality video files are linked to the thession pages - Step 11 is COMPLETE The encoding process is proceeding apace and last I looked, there are 10 sessions to complete encoding - Step 12 is 93% I now need to a final pass through...

I’ve been excited by LightSwitch since I first saw it more than 18 months ago and the recent release of the Beta 2 version and the updated Training Kit has just got me more excited. The Training Kit includes the following content: LightSwitch Overview Demo: Introducing Visual Studio LightSwitch Hands...

SharePoint Saturday has reached Australia recently with the efforts of Brian Farnhill and Ben Walters in both Melbourne and Sydney . Jeremy Thake from Perth SharePoint User Group thought it was about time it happened in Perth with the help of other volunteers. The event is provisionally announced for...

Sessions Posted The first pass of the sessions at have been posted and if you're a delegate you can login and vote for your favourite sessions (to help us with timetabling and room allocation). Your votes will be automatically migrated to your agenda when we finalise the time and room stuff. If you're...

Got a note in may inbox over the weekend announcing some developer training happening in Darwin. I see Dave's beaten me to it , but I'll repeat here because I reckon it's worthwhile encouraging these kinds of things especially in our more … regional … locations. There are four courses being run, some...

We’re looking for a new Audience Lead at work. You will be managing many of the evangelists (including me) and marketers in DPE. This is a great  job, with great responsibility and frankly we want to ensure we get the right person for the gig. The formal job description can be found here. However...

As I said in my update , we've had an overwhelming response to our Call for Content for TechEd Australia and New Zealand. Submissions are now closed and the Track Owners are beavering away making final decisions about which of the huge selection of content they have to choose from they can actually fit...

I had a great response from the certification vouchers I gave out three months ago . Unfortunately I don’t have any more of those to give away, but Microsoft Learning have announced an offer that’s almost as good. If you’re a MCP and you got your last certification before July 1 2007, you can get a voucher...

There was a question on one of the internal lists today: "Looking for a no-brainer way to demo just adding a simple button to Office that goes to a URL." It’s going to work a little differently in Word & Excel than it does in Outlook. Word/Excel/Etc (apps with Ribbon) For a Word/Excel addin...

The JAOO conference in Sydney May (5)7-8 and Brisbane May (9)11-14 looks great. The speaker list reads like a who’s-who with Greg Willis, Nick Hodge, Joel Pobar and a whole lot more . We’ve managed to find a comp ticket to each of these events to give away. Drop me a note telling me why you should have...

Brian Madsen pinged me today, at almost the same time as my automatic notification arrived. This month the Linked .Net Users Group has two great Live Meetings as pare of their ongoing program (recordings of previous sessions are archived here ). Session 1 – register here April 8th 03:00 Sydney time ...

We’ve got some sensational WPF training kits just in. There’s some great content in these 2-disk sets and we’re looking to get them out widely. Dave Glover ’s organising a bunch of 1-day training sessions presented by the community . I’ll have a stack of them at Code Camp They’ll be available from your...

Tim’s blogged about a cool WPF reference application released onto CodePlex by Microsoft and Vertigo. Family.Show 3 is a family tree program that allows you to quickly enter relationships, key dates and other information. Dave tells me it’s not perfect for that (it’s a reference app and has some limitations...

Just got this note from Paul Yuknewicz . There’s an update to the VB6 support page on MSDN . In summary: Since the initial release of this support statement, the Windows 7 operating system has been announced.  This document has been updated to clarify Microsoft’s support for VB6 on Windows 7. VB6...

I’m catching up with some blogging I’ve been meaning to do for ages and this is one of the first things I wanted to post. The team looking after getting the word out about Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 are doing a series of Video Podcasts they’ve called 10-4 (the code name for VS2010 was Dev 10, and...

Update – Sorry folks. All these vouchers are gone. I’ll post again if I can get any more. First, Happy New Year to all! Community , Certification , News , Static News , Database Editorial , Smart Client Editorial , Web Development Editorial Anyone who's followed this blog for any length of time knows...

I was chatting to some community folk in the pub last night after presenting (on Architectural patterns on S+S – slides here ) at the Sydney Deep .NET User Group *. I heard an interesting premise: “Good developers don’t want to do SharePoint development because it’s too easy”. To me, this passes the...

Many of you know that Norbert Haehnel long-time director of my team, Developer and Platform Evangelism, here in Australia recently departed to take up a position at Microsoft in Germany. In fact, his last gig here was to MC the Power To Developers event Steve Ballmer keynoted. The burning question (for...

SQL guru David Lean has joined the blogosphere and, of course, he’s started with some hardcore SQL Spatial information. Check out these great posts: SQL 2008 Spatial Samples, Part 1 of 9 - How to Learn SQL Spatial SQL 2008 Spatial Samples, Part 2 of 9 - Background on Spatial Types & Well Known Text...

As I said in my MSDN Flash editorial , I had a great time presenting at Ignite Spatial last Wednesday – the atmosphere was great and the format was a lot of fun. I’ve popped the deck up on my skydrive and would love some feedback if you were there. Is this a format we should be adopting for at least...

Fin asked me to write this week’s MSDN Flash editorial, so I did. In case you missed it, here it is. By the way, if you don’t subscribe to the flash, you should :). Sign up today ! It's been a real time for me with events. First the PDC in Los Angeles with over 6,000 developers (in case you missed it...

Matt Nunn , Group Product Manager for Visual Studio Team System will present "The Road to Visual Studio 2010", a presentation (and live demo) aimed at technical decision makers. Matt will provide a first look at the next version of Microsoft’s development tool platform – Visual Studio 2010...

Developers, Developers, Developers! As part of a whirlwind visit to Sydney early next month, Steve Ballmer will be presenting Microsoft's future vision for developers in the world of software-plus-services. He'll discuss the next wave of technologies just launched at the Professional Developer Conference...