Two great apps that work great together: “Hey, you got your event in my UGSS!” “No, you got your event in my Community Megaphone !” If you’re a developer looking for events, or a community leader looking to get your events promoted, one challenge you...

I mentioned in a previous post that I’d been getting up earlier lately, as an experiment to see what being an early bird could do for this former night owl. I’m about a month into the experiment, and the results are quite promising. I have: been getting...

The MSDN Mid-Atlantic Roadshow rides again…our next series of roadshow events kicks off later this month in Reston, VA. Currently, we’ve got the Reston event, and also a roadshow stop scheduled for Richmond, VA in March. We’ll have more cities to announce...

This is a nice example of maturity . It’s not always easy to recognize when something you want really bad…something you’ve convinced yourself you deserve, would not be good for you. And it can be even harder, once you recognize, to allow that to change...

Since I’ve run into this issue myself, I thought I’d share a blog post that offers several possible workarounds while the ASP.NET team is looking at the issue: If you are using the ASP.NET Menu control, you might encounter under certain circumstances...

Scott Hanselman has shared a great story about the things that can happen before (and during) a technical presentation , particularly a complex one. My personal favorite demo-gone-bad moment from my 12+ years as a presenter was the Visual Studio Launch...

One of the more fun and compelling sample applications for WPF, which I demoed this morning at the MSDN Roadshow in Reston, VA, has just been updated, as announced by Tim Sneath : It’s been a little while in coming, but I’m delighted to announce that...

Steve Smith has some interesting things to say about one of the passionate debates of the day among developers: In the last year or so, there has been an increasing amount of discussion on software craftsmanship, and what it means and whether or not it...

OK, so some of this stuff would have been (and still would be) very helpful during my recent updates to Community Megaphone . I finally got around to setting up a separate dev database, plus a staging server for testing new bits in a non-local setting...

Thanks to all the folks who came out for Tuesday’s MSDN Mid-Atlantic Roadshow in Reston, VA. Below you’ll find links to the slides, demos, and other resources mentioned during the presentations. If you have any questions, please let me know . Decks: Around...

It’s lengthy, and I haven’t had the time to read through the whole thing, but this is a delightful look at the most common pattern in application architecture, the Big Ball of Mud : Abstract While much attention has been focused on high-level software...

While I can’t claim to be a huge adherent of any particular set of development principles (I admire others’ passion in this area, but I’m very pragmatic when it comes to getting a given task done…there are lots of ways to do it, many of which can be ...

Here’s a collection of useful tools for generating CSS layouts, tabs, rounded corners, etc.: http://www.thegermz.com/my-ramblings/60-css-tools-to-reduce-your-work-load Note that some of these do not work properly on IE 8, though compatibility mode helps...

As I spend more time working on the client side, I’m more and more impressed with the jQuery JavaScript framework, and really glad that we’ve decided to ship it with future versions of Visual Studio (as well as with the soon-to-be-released ASP.NET MVC...

A couple of nights ago, I presented on web development fundamentals at the CMAP .NET Essentials SIG. One of the things we talked about was the fact that the .NET Framework is pretty large, so a challenge for new devs is figuring out where everything they...

We’ll be in Reston, VA next week to talk about all things Windows Client. Here’s the session list: Around the World of Windows Client in 75 Minutes Create Rich User Experiences with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Re-use Your Skills and Code to...

Denny Boynton , a fellow Microsoft Evangelist, has started a new blog series on Windows 7 that looks interesting, starting with a post on locking down which apps can be installed on your PC : I’ve been running Windows 7 Beta on all of my machines, work...

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area…this list now includes events imported from the UGSS event calendar , and all events entered in Community Megaphone are also now automatically synced...

Folks who follow me on Twitter (or those who follow a number of other folks) might have noticed something a little weird going on this weekend. Following a series of “retro” avatar pics that I posted, from my childhood and college (and early post-college...

Tuesday, February 24th is the kickoff of the next MSDN Roadshow tour, in Reston, VA. We’ve still got room for more developers eager to learn about the latest in Windows Client technologies. Among the topics to be covered are: Windows Presentation Foundation...

One of the UX technologies I mentioned during my talk for the MSDN Roadshow today was the Sidebar (and in Windows 7, Desktop) gadgets, which are great for surfacing small amounts of information in a a compact space. One of the attendees asked whether...

If you’re interested in improving the architecture and testability of your WPF applications, you may want to check out this video, in which Adam Kinney of The Continuum , interviews Karl Shifflett from the WPF team about the MVVM design pattern: Good...

Anyone who’s used CSS more than just a little knows that there are many CSS tricks and techniques that look great in one browser, but look terrible (or simply don’t work) in another. One cool way to get around this is to use jQuery (and jQuery plug-ins...

…including “ The Birth of Smooth Streaming ” In my last post I talked about the history of multi-bitrate streaming and how we got from RTSP and HTTP streaming back to HTTP download as the primary media web distribution mechanism. In this post we’ll take...

Great tip from Jason Gaylord : I don’t get an opportunity to use Microsoft Expression Web that often, but when I do, I always discover new features. I was looking for a way to compress HTML and JavaScript files that I was generating for one of our affiliations...