The current situation is roughly: The majority of PCs have a version of the .NET Framework A fair number of PCs do not have the .NET Framework A fair number of PCs have .NET Framework 1.1 A lot more PCs have .NET Framework 2.0 A lot of PCs have .NET Framework 3.0 In comparison, relatively few (bare in...

My notebook (a rather nice Compaq nc8430 ) is in need of a major cleanup. Over the last 6 months I have installed many Beta (and Alpha) bits of software. Hence it has the odd “issue” :-) We are about to enter a “most has RTM’d moment”: SQL Server 2008 Visual Studio 2008 SP1 .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Sync...

I spotted Mike had posted on Windows Vista and that we find ourselves in a strange place. We have a product that is way better than the perception amongst “those in the know”. First up – I really was not a fan of Vista on day one of release. I had a lot of issues with drivers and application compatibility...

Every so often I open a CHM and I get the table of contents but no actual contents. I have looked before for the answer, found it, remembered it for a few weeks – then forgotten all about it again. Maybe if I actually write it down, I won’t forget again (I learn best by writing). The problem is Vista...

My notebook was down to the last 800MB of disk space. Amazingly I just claimed back 17GB through Windows Vista Disk Cleanup! Wow! The big wins were: It turned off Hibernate functionality for me - which I never used (3.4GB) It got rid of a bunch of dmp files from when I had some driver issues causing...

WPF is an awesome technology - but it has the odd "beauty spot". One example is the absence of a DataGrid control. WPF 3.0 shipped in Nov 2006 without a DataGrid WPF 3.5 shipped in Nov 2007, alas again without a DataGrid WPF 3.5 SP1 will ship later this year, alas again without a DataGrid ...

Call of Duty 4 is a great game - but just occasionally, it trashes all your progress which is held locally. The answer is to copy your progress somewhere safe. On Windows XP you need to backup the players folder which contains progress for all user logins. C:\Program Files (x86)\Activision\Call of Duty...

Something we have been looking at recently is taking an approach we use frequently with our managed ISVs and make it more broadly available - with a twist. I am speaking of technology reviews - half day 1:1 technical sessions. During a technology review we try to build a detailed picture of how an ISV...

Working for Microsoft has many benefits - an obvious one being I don't have to pay for Visual Studio, which means I simply install the top of the range SKU. Hence I am running Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite (catchy isn't it :)). But... the early adopters I work with often are not using the...

One of the challenges we have had when working with UK ISVs on Windows Presentation Foundation is to get them to think about the user interface as anything other than a gray canvas onto which you drop lots of labels, text boxes and buttons. It has been tough. Not least because my entire team comes from...

I first blogged on this back in January but based on all my meetings in Feb, very few ISVs seem to know about it. Lets expand a little. The most often repeated reason I’ve been given for wanting access to the Microsoft source code is for debugging and optimisation purposes: A developer has a problem...

2008 has included a number of conversations with ISVs along the lines of "We are currently Java but we think .NET might be a better choice for us. Can you help?" and "We are currently using old technology X and are considering changing to Java or .NET. Please tell us more about .NET"...

It is becoming increasingly common for UK ISVs to ask us about Silverlight. Which is a good thing as I have previously blogged about why ISVs should care about Silverlight and these are important discussions which can impact technology choices which may easily live for 5, 10 or more years in the products...

Last week we announced that RC1 of Vista Service Pack 1 was now available broadly to MSDN and Technet subscribers. I decided to give it a whirl as my main notebook has been feeling rather sickly of late (To be fair it is loaded with beta and alpha Microsoft software). The good news - SP1 installed without...

In my previous post I talked about where is the redist for Service Pack 1? Whilst looking into this issue for an early adopter, I also struggled to find the release notes for SP1 (and http://support.microsoft.com simply refused to help!). Thanks to an internal search I finally came across most of what...

The short answer is... it doesn't exist yet. Thankfully things are not quite as bad as that. There are a couple of approaches an ISV can take if you plan to redistribute the .NET Framework AND you can not rely on Internet connectivity to take advantage of the SP1 bootstrap download. Option 1: If client...

Shameless copy and paste - but great stuff nevertheless. The Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit has been updated for the RTM and has been released on the Microsoft.com Download Center for anyone to download and use.  The Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit contains a full 5-days of technical content including...

Still comes up in discussion - therefore to avoid all confusion... hold this picture in the back of your mind.  

Acropolis was a project to make building LOB applications using Windows Forms or WPF much easier than it is today - by moving away from the "blank canvas" approach we currently have in Visual Studio. An early CTP build was released and a lot of folks looked at it and gave back "rich"...

Mark Quirk in our team is a top chap - he is also over at TechEd in Barcelona this week and has just sent back a great report. I don't think Mark blogs so I have taken the liberty of posting on a slightly edited version. Well worth a read. Thanks Mark. The event info can be found here: http://www.microsoft...

Two of my ISVs were asking about Microsoft applications which use the .NET Framework. When I had a quick look on the web I found a very good but quite old post from Daniel on this area (still very much worth a read) http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2004/11/02/251254.aspx I think it is probably...

The latest Windows SDK is now available for installation as an ISO download. The SDK release supports: Windows Server 2008 RC0 Windows Vista SP1 Beta .NET Framework 3.5 Beta2. and is compatible with the RTM release of Microsoft® Visual Studio 2005 SP1 (including Express Editions). I did chuckle slightly...

Last Thursday we delivered a day briefing on developing server applications with IIS7, WCF, WF, MSMQ as well as a swift look at Designing For Operations. The "official" followup email should happen in the next few days with details of how to download the decks and code. In the meantime, here are the...

These are exciting times - lots of new technologies which will be useful to UK ISVs. The following is a list of just how broad our remit is right now - and in case you were wondering. We are a team of.... 8 :-) Visual Studio 2008 – great new development environment which can build .NET Framework 2.0...

The choice of technology for delivering UX is getting wider. Three years back it would have been (in most cases) a simple choice of Windows Forms or HTML+JScript. Today ISVs are trying to pick a UX technology which will serve them well for the next 5 or 10 years. The choices include: HTML+JScript HTML...