Ian Griffiths is helping to deliver training to our ISV WPF early adopters (he just helped deliver a weeks training on this in the UK). Ian has excellent knowledge of the .NET Framework and specifically Windows Forms - which made him a natural choice...

My wife has a deep seated fear of dialog boxes. When they pop up on her PC she stands up and searches for (initially) the children, then if she can't find them she walks upstairs to my home office, interrupts whatever I am doing and marches me back down...

I just noticed we released 12 WPF labs for the January CTP. This looks like a great way of getting up to speed on WPF. Tim explains the background to these labs - for your convenience here is the list and download link : Building a Forms-Based...

The February CTP of the WinFX Runtime Components is now available. The big change this time around is Windows Presentation Foundation which benefits from several months of development work (Nov, Dec, Jan didn't really include any significant changes)...

I delivered a session to a full house on Tuesday which included a small demo on Service Broker. A big thanks to all who showed. I hope to see some of you again on Thursday in my intro to BI session. I promised to post the code - enjoy. CREATE DATABASE...

Spotted we had an interesting (and free) UK event coming up on Web Security. To register head to http://msevents-eu.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=118768906&Culture=en-GB

I keep meaning to blog about this - better late than never. One challenge for all of us working with WinFX is the lack of tools for developing presentation with - the January CTP of WinFX gave us a better drop of Cider (The feedback I got on the Dec CTP...

My group is delivering in March our first 2 day conference just for Architects near Newport (thats just off the M4 a touch west of London :-)). The agenda is looking great with six tracks and some great speakers including Ivar Jacobson (errr.... and yep...

After a couple of recent discussions I have realised that only a few of our early adopters spotted that we have created a go-live license for WinFX - hence worth mentioning here. Specifically we announced in january a go-live licence for the Windows Communication...

Ok - I admit it - I haven't really played with it - but my colleague Mike Taulty has - and I found it an interesting read. Check out his full post on his experiences with Beta 1 or the highlights here: " Now, I'm not a Workflow zealot in that I think...

In the UK we had a lot of ISVs interested in TFS while it was beta. Then we put back the release of TFS to post VS.NET 2005 and .... things went a little quiet for us as ISVs spent their R&D cycles elsewhere. The good news for them (and the rest of...

I have been watching with interest as www.live.com begins to take shape - more specifically, as more and more gadgets are created which can be "hosted" on Windows Live. Gadgets are a new category of mini-application designed to provide information, useful...

Recently I have been asked the same question by technical folks I bump into in my travels - "What should I do to start to look at SQL Server 2005". The places I tend to send them to are: Overview of What is New - take a few minutes to get a feel...

This week we are running SQL Server 2005 Application Compatibility Labs in the UK for our ISV partners. An opportunity for an ISV to work with subject matter experts to ensure their solution which is today using SQL Server 2000 will work without issue...

During Feb I plan to set aside some time to explore Windows Workflow - and the great news is it would appear my timing is spot on :) There are lots of resources out there now - articles, webcasts, blogs - and in the January CTP of WinFX we now have a...