Guy who runs the excellent DotNetDevNet user group out of Bristol posted back in June on the top speakers from the first 50 meetings and let me know I made the top 10 for knowledge (Cough! ) and presentation skills (I have skills! Wow ) Well, I’ve finally revisited his post to have a proper look and...

Ok… it doesn’t really but this still cheered my Thursday eve. Whilst perusing the blog of BF3   I spotted that publisher behemoth EA  were doing an “innocent poll” on mobile devices.  As background, BF3 is arguably the game of 2011 which puts PC gaming back on the map for mainstream FPS fans, easily...

Just a short note to say I’m back on this blog… I’m back on twitter … I never left LinkedIn … except… I have buggered up my eyes and optician has told me to dramatically reduce my pc usage for a couple of days. Catch you all soon.

Abby is a fellow evangelist at Microsoft with a specific focus on working with startups in the USA. Abby has some great insights into how to be a successful startup. Now my team in the UK are focused primarily on ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) but it turns out that a pretty high percentage of startups...

Bindi forwarded on this picture of me “talking Azure” at the Biztalk event we held in London on the 25th of March. Made me chuckle :) David and I had a great time with the afternoon session – which ended up pretty much a two hour Q&A. Related Links: Tell us what you are doing (or plan to do) with...

Tuesday evening I found myself minus family. I decided to use the time to “have a crack at this Silverlight Phone 7 stuff”. From zero (no experience, no tools installed, no membership on the AppHub) to submitted for approval took me from 8pm to 1am – with the last hour messing around with png files in...

This post is simple superb – What if Visual Studio had Achievements :-) Although maybe you need to a developer who also has an Xbox to fully understand how good it is. My favourites: Shotgun Debugging – 5 Consecutive Solution Rebuilds with a single character change The Architect – Created 25 Interfaces...

A year or so back I was using the Boot from VHD feature lots – but not in recent times and not with my current laptop configuration (Lenovo T61p with 2nd internal hard drive). In readiness for the upcoming SharePoint 2010 training for UK ISVs in February I wanted to make use of a Microsoft created SharePoint...

I would like to wish anyone and everyone who visits this blog (even the spammer) or who I have had the pleasure to work with in 2010 (or for that matter 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006… 1996) A very M erry C hristmas and a fun and healthy N ew Y ear Picture brought to you by Bob Cratchett -  alias colleague,...

This is a great idea, very nicely done. The aim is to help the 9 million people in the UK who have never been online do just that – go online. Check it out and get involved http://www.get-someone-online.com/

Two separate emails arrived in my Inbox. Email #1: The results of  detailed survey of UK ISVs which we had commissioned – what makes them tick etc. In that survey it stated “76% of ISVs do not use any ALM tools”. It also stated that of those that did, most only did the basics. I#m not surprised … but...

Lately I have noticed a trend. An “issue” I have been working around for months (or sometimes years) can actually be solved really easily and often very cheaply – if I just pause for a few seconds to think about a permanent fix. Obvious really, yet my life is full of (rather pleasing) workarounds. The...

Just refreshed the browser on my SharePoint site and got…. this… Brought a nice smile to my face. Related Links Work through the modules at Get Started Developing on SharePoint 2010 . and download the SharePoint Developer Training Kit .

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MSDN blogs is all shiny and new today. Which ultimately means I need to a) rejig the layout etc of this blog and b) repost some items for May which were not automatically migrated (by design) to the new platform. Probably also worth reminding folks that my primary blog is http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable...

Cute :)

Back in February we did our first special edition of the UK MSDN Flash focused on Free Software for developers (Which was our most popular edition for years!). The next special edition will be June 17th and the focus will be Open Source Software for developers with a bias (slight!) towards some of the...

I started reading into the SOLID Principles in March bit didn’t get very far before I moved on to do some other stuff (sound familiar?). Then today I stumble across a site with a bunch of motivational pictures based on the SOLID Principles and I have included my two favourites. SOLID is a collection...

I spent last week enjoying the sun (and rain and wind and fog) in Yorkshire and managed to pretty much avoid email/work all week which was great. I did manage a little “evangelism” during the week though. My dad has an old compaq notebook which has been playing up for months. I decided to use Live Mesh...

I was discussing with one of our TFS specialists the costs of going down the route of Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server – specifically in the context of comparing it with purchasing Visual SourceSafe (VSS). This conversation was kicked off by the poll I did in the UK MSDN Flash on...

Devweek is my fave multi-day developer conference in the UK and attracts great speakers such as Aaron Skonnard , Neal Ford and Tim Ewald. Which is why I always feel a little humble that I get the chance to present there. This time around I delivered three sessions (See my discussion of what to expect...

While chatting with Tim Ewald last week at Devweek we got onto the topic of “ways to improve the MSDN experience” (Tim sits in that team). Part of that discussion was the “Low Bandwith” option for MSDN which has been around for many months. What I had not realised was that apparently very few folks know...

Well, it sort of is :-) Eight weeks ago I made my primary blog http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/ for a variety of reasons . I have no plans to change that as geekswithblogs.net is a great service. However I always had at the back of my mind the intention to cross-post to http://blogs.msdn.com/ericnel...

[This blog is moving to http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable ] I have just had a 2 hour battle with Live Mesh which has reminded me just how much I have come to rely on Live Mesh in my day to day life and how well it normally works (It gets the “It just works” tick) I am currently regularly using...

I previously posted on the VB6.0 survey for UK companies which has a great prize of four days of Visual Basic 2008 training. We do have a second (even shorter) survey which will help us plan for FY10 (which starts July 1st for Microsoft). From the MSDN Flash : “ And finally my marketing colleague...