I wanted a high level diagram which allowed me to talk about how the technologies worked together, worked apart, cover off areas such as multiple SSDLs, multiple EDMs etc. Very much work in progress and the build helps – but comments welcome and appreciated...

I get quite a random set of questions coming into my Inbox from folks I meet at events, conferences and through my blog. I thought it might be useful if I started sharing my answers when these come in. To start this off, I was asked: “We have two .NET...

Blimey – and I am only just getting my head round Visual Studio 2008 :-) These are exciting times. You can find all the public details over on msdn . There is also a week of videos appearing on channel9 . Nearly forgot, we are having another stab at decent...

I keep talking about Entity Framework and I keep getting asked about large databases. I have a stock answer based on work by an early adopter and some other stuff – but I kept meaning to try this out myself. I was about to give it a whirl when I decided...

I finally managed to get along to my local user group last week and had a great time. Whilst it meets 10 miles from my home, I seem to rarely be 10miles from them when the actual date comes around. It was good to chat with Guy who runs it and many of...

It was my colleague MikeT who put me on to Fiddler a while back and it has proven to be really useful for my work with Data Services. By chance I just came across this example in which Shawn uses Fiddler to look at performance issues. At which point I...

I have just finished my regular clean out of tools that I have installed and which have not passed the “Am I still using it 1 month on?” test. The four that remain are: PPTFlex – which gives you a completely different paradigm for delivering a presentation...

Apologies to those who attended last week. I did promise to put up a blog post with all my links. Hopefully you got most of them from my previous blogs on a similar event we held on the 17th and from a related session I did a ReMix UK. The missing link...

I just spotted that my colleague MikeT kicked off a “ Are you a UK person heading to PDC ” thread on Channel9 . I would be amazed if (at the time of writing) there are only 6 or so of you going :-) Go on, take a minute to add yourself . PDCs are great...

All of the links I showed are included in a session I did last week for QBS except the following: Dynamic Data Entity Framework Workaround – this allows ADO.NET Entity Framework to better work with ASP.NET Dynamic Data ADO.NET Entity Framework Extensions...

As promised, the links from my session today on the new data stuff on 3.5 and 3.5 SP1. Thanks for listening. General ADO.NET Team Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet Mike in our team http://www.miketaulty.com ( search Entity or LINQ ) Data Platform Developer...

We have a rather impressive set of new technologies for working with data – LINQ, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, Data Services, ASP.NET Dynamic Data etc. What I am finding is… they don’t all get on with each other as well as you might have thought. My...

I opened Outlook today to find some spam about MSDN :-) I nearly deleted it without reading – but then spotted who it was from – it was from me :-) I did write it – but that was many weeks ago and I had completely forgotten we were sending these out:...

I admit it was past midnight when I went looking for this download and maybe that impacted a little on my ability to find it  - but 10 minutes of my life is too long!!! I expected there to be an obvious link on MSDN as it feels like something a lot...

As a fairly new editor of the UK MSDN Flash I am curious to know which sections people find most useful and why. All other suggestions also very happily received.

The very first domain I registered was fancyaferret.co.uk. This was many years back and TBH the reason now escapes me. The first thing I did with it was place an image of David Cassidy up on it – which is another story all together. Anyway – my lovely...

Mike who owns the dev track at Remix has unfortunately lost a speaker and I have offered to help – and to my surprise he said yes. The slight challenge being that I am very light on Silverlight and whilst I was once quite heavily into ASP.NET (back in...

Blimey – this week has been busy. If your metaphor for working on lots of things is “juggling balls”, well I feel like I fell into the under 5’s ball pit :-) My blog has been one of those things that has had to be “dropped” – just at the time when I have...

Just spotted that some folks are trying to set up a new user group in Lincolnshire called (rather cleverly) the "Lincolnshire Microsoft Developers User Group". You can find them at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/LMSDev/ In their own words...

Just about to go to sleep – but wanted to throw out something I have been pondering on. Should we as a team create a regular weekly podcast? The facts are: As a team we screencast, blog, do events etc As a team we do not podcast I work with some very...

Just had confirmation that we have added two more MSDN half day events for November and December. Hope to see you there. Nov 19th http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032387211&Culture=en-GB   Dec 3rd http://msevents.microsoft...

The last 10 years have been exciting if you are a developer. Lots of new programming languages, lots of new IDEs, lots of new tools, lots of new approaches, lots of new apis but … as an industry are we developing software any better than we were 10 years...