IUpdateable from Eric Nelson (http://ericnelson.wordpress.com)

As much as I love Metro style applications, the announcement on Friday (8th June) gets a big thumbs up from me Read more on the Visual Studio Blog. ...read more

I was pointed in the direction of this article by a colleague “Shocker: Windows 8 is an Android killer”. It is a smörgåsbord of great quotes. Windows 8 is going to be awesome “working with Windows 8 is simple and enjoyable” “In those seven weeks, we’ve managed to create a solid first version, that works [...] ...read more

Many of us are familiar with: Editing code in Visual Studio Editing HTML files in a text editor (perhaps Visual Studio) Editing XAML files in a text editor (perhaps Visual Studio) But… far fewer of us are familiar with Expression Blend… which turns out to be a “must have” for Windows 8 Metro style app [...] ...read more

Are you a Windows Forms developer looking to develop a touch enabled application? Perhaps a touch enabled application that sports the latest Windows 8 Metro style of applications? One choice would be to take forward your .NET skills and learn the new XAML presentation framework that comes with Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11. This [...] ...read more

Two great posts by the Telerik team documenting what it took to move a Windows Phone app to a Windows 8 Metro style app. I would recommend you download a high resolution pdf (7MB) of the posts. Designing a Windows 8 Metro style app starting from an existing Windows Phone app – Design Case Study [...] ...read more

We all would love to see the list of Windows 8 tablet machines…but for the moment the OEMs are largely keeping their powder dry. However I have pulled together what I have spotted so far … which is certainly enough to keep me excited Be warned … some are simply rumours! In date order: September [...] ...read more

As a consumer you would use the Windows 8 Store to get an application onto Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The store is a great way to discover, try, buy (optional) and update applications. But… if you are an Enterprise looking to get Metro applications onto your employees Windows 8 desktops then you will likely want [...] ...read more

Then check out the details over on the MSDN blog before doing step 1 – apply to join our shiny new UK Windows 8 for Application Developer LinkedIn Group which opens up the possibility of being invited to an Application Excellence Lab at Microsoft in Reading. I would also encourage everyone to come along to [...] ...read more

Cerebrata (now owned UK company Red-Gate) make awesome tools for Windows Azure – thanks largely to the work of Gaurav Mantri. And it just so happens that the UK Windows Azure User Group has Gaurav speaking on April 3rd in London. Definitely a session worth attending if you are in London that day. Gaurav Mantri, [...] ...read more

I’ve just had confirmation that I will be off to Toronto in July to spend a weak immersing myself in our latest musings to our fantastic partners on Windows 8, Windows Azure, Private Cloud and more… whilst also having the opportunity to meet and chat with UK partners who are attending – and in theory [...] ...read more

In other words… the ones I know about and keep using …and need to jot down somewhere (here!) lest I forget Charms and App Bar   Windows-C Open the Charms bar. Windows-I Open the Settings charm. Windows-K Open the Connect charm. Windows-H Open the Share charm. Windows-Q Open the Search pane. Windows-W Open the Settings [...] ...read more

This one seems to keep popping up… The following is true as of 12th March 2012 Short Answer: No. You will need Visual Studio 2010 or 2008. Long Answer:  You will need to setup a development environment for Windows Azure using Visual Studio 2010 before installing Visual Studio 11. You can find details here. ...read more

My group is laying on a a three city (London, Manchester and Edinburgh) tour which focuses on the Windows 8 opportunities for developers. These are one day events providing accelerated learning on Windows 8 application development.  More details on the  UK Tech.Days home page. London, Friday, 30th March 2012 – Register Manchester, Friday, 27th April [...] ...read more

I have previously posted some of the “raw data” on Six Weeks of Windows Azure but I wanted to also share some thoughts about “how it went” and “how we might do things differently” in the form of a mini retrospective. What went well? Achieved a lot for very little money Our budget was £0. [...] ...read more

I wanted to share some of the “raw data” from Six Weeks of Windows Azure which started way back in January and completed today (29th Feb 2012) I will shortly do a mini-retrospective. Top Level: Web site visits: 23,140 (as of 29th Feb) with 1857 visits on the busiest day Partners involved: 11 (partners) Sessions: [...] ...read more

Steve has pulled together a gentle stroll through DNS, CNAME records and multiple web sites and how they all related to Windows Azure. This was in response to frequent questions we had on this area during Six Weeks of Windows Azure. Thanks Steve. Steve and his pen ...read more

One of the companies on www.sixweeksofazure.co.uk asked us about the specifics of deploying into a single web role two solutions – one built in PHP and one built in ASP.NET. I reached out to Brian Swan for help. Brian is one of the Microsoft team focused on making PHP developers very happy on the Microsoft [...] ...read more

Head over to www.sixweeksofazure.co.uk and click on Week 1 and Week 2 to get details. It is not too late to join us – there is after all still 4 more weeks to go and we have recordings of the first two weeks. Sign up today! Note: This is primarily targeting UK companies – but [...] ...read more

Note: for me this service has sometimes not worked today (24th Jan). I have reported it to the events team. Next session is Wednesday 10am – Designing for the Cloud. 44WW076 – Six Weeks of Azure – Weekly check-in (AM recording 23.01.2012) “The one where the all internet connectivity vanished with 5 mins to go” [...] ...read more

Now available on SkyDrive. Check out Week1 for slides and “Webinar Notes” for todays notes. We will expand the Notes a little further tomorrow once we go through the Q&A. ...read more

The webinar join links are now live on the website http://sixweeksofazure.wordpress.com/joinwebinar/  We start at 12pm today (Monday 23rd January) but we will have the meeting open during the morning. Hence I would encourage you to join now to check your PC connects fine. See you all at 12pm Eric and the team ...read more

Turned out to be simplicity itself (thanks to this sweet tutorial). Great work team on the Windows Azure SDK for node.js and some lovely Powershell integration. Which in the management portal shows up as: Currently running (Thursday 19th Jan 2012) at http://ericnelnode1.cloudapp.net/ with the exciting output of: Related Links: Source code for SDK available on [...] ...read more

Next Monday we start Six Weeks of Windows Azure with: The 12pm opening session will look ahead at what you can expect from the six weeks and will offer advice on how best to make use of the time. It will also share tips, tools and resources to help you get going from day one. [...] ...read more

Ashwin Raghavan contacted me via this blog about the dissertation he is working on for his MBA and whether I would be able to answer some questions for him. I thought his questions were bang on. I’ll share my answers later … but for now, ponder on these In your view, do you agree with [...] ...read more

This is a very handy utility when working with web apis – I assumed I was last to discover it, turns out I’m not Hurl makes HTTP requests. Enter a URL, set some headers, view the response, then share it with others. Perfect for demoing and debugging APIs And… as is the trend these days… [...] ...read more