Good managers know 2 things – 1) surround yourself with knowledgeable personnel and 2) enact processes to enable support when things go south. Whether you use a pure Microsoft stack for your application development or a heterogeneous one, Premier...

Ever wonder how Microsoft configures and deploys SharePoint? Well, Microsoft IT recently completed its migration to SharePoint 2010. When sensible, the team automated its process to improve efficiency. Scripting is shared, including remote installs using...

Now that all of the major browsers support most of the HTML5 specification, it’s time to start exploring what all the fuss is about. At MIX11, HTML5 was one of the hottest topics whether about development, IE9, IE10 or Mango’s native browser...

Recently at TechEd , Ted Kummert, Senior Vice President BPD, announced a partnership with SAP that showcased tighter integration for application development and cloud deployments. This announcement describes SAP and Microsoft’s plans to focus on...

Creating installation packages is not something any developer likes to see on their task list because of the complexities that present iteself but it is a necessary evil to get software installed on an end users machine. There are some very good third...

The more time I spend using Team Foundation Server (TFS), the more I believe it’s an integral component of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Framework. Now while most organizations employ some sort of source control and change management...

So you don’t use Visual Studio as your main IDE and instead use Eclipse with Team Explorer Everywhere but want to tailor TFS to suite your (and/or your teams) needs. Not a problem as with this new SDK it’s now possible to fully customize,...

A quick post to mention that the SharePoint team has been hard at work putting together the first service pack (SP) for SharePoint 2010. Highlights Site Recycle Bin Shallow Copy Storage Space Allocation Check out the team’s blog...

For years the Enterprise Library (EL) application blocks have helped developers address the typical cross-cutting concerns of enterprise development (such as diagnostic logging, data validation, caching, and exception handing). With over 3 million downloads...

Today kicked off TechEd 2011 and there’s no shortage of news coming out of the conference. Most notable is what Visual Studio has to offer concerning application lifecycle management (ALM). During the keynote session, Jason Zander (corporate vice...

Full disclosure: I’m a big proponent of Visual Studio but when it comes to creating data screens over and over again is, what’s the word I’m looking for – tiresome. Combine that with having to find and tweak some code because this...

I’m always looking for training on new Microsoft technology and while white papers and sample code have their place they do leave something to be desired. Videos are definitely an improvement and when combined with the aforementioned items work...

Here’s a typical scenario: The Project Management Office (PMO) has standardized on Project Server (PS) for project and portfolio management while the development teams are using Team Foundation Server to manage development projects. Now while each...

In case you haven’t heard, “the cloud” is a big deal and software development is shifting momentum from building purely focused desktop applications towards this paradigm (or some hybrid thereof). Performance in any application is important...

If you have no idea who Anders is (for shame!) then like any true computer geek you probably turn to Wikipedia. Yes, you know you’ve made it when you get your very own wiki page . Seriously though, Anders is a Technical Fellow in the Developer Division...

I’m going to be showing my age here a bit but I remember when Visual Basic (VB) was born. To this day I still recall memories of using v3.0 (circa 1993) to add an icon to a bland gray beveled button whose action was to retrieve data from an Access...

Visual SourceSafe (VSS) was a good tool for code management. Almost too good in fact as development teams weren’t in a rush to migrate away from it (although anyone using VSS could easily rattle off its flaws). Is it on par with Team Foundation...