My job has changed recently to focus on the needs of developers who service small businesses. I can now talk about some of the work I've been doing with the launch the Small Business Developer Center . I've been looking at this space for about a year...

I’m sure you’ve all been drinking the MIX from the conference that’s going on in Vegas at the moment, but in case you haven’t I wanted to call this out. Dynamic Languages are becoming an important new RAD tool to be familiar with, especially when consuming...

Visual Studio 2005 keybaord shortcuts help make you more productive by giving quick access to common and not-so-common functions within the IDE. I've had wall posters designed for each of the popular langauges in Visual Studio 2005 for you to print out...

The 3rd Visual Studio SDK release is cool for many reasons, but mostly because it's the first release of the SDK that allows developers to use Visual Studio to host any language targeting any runtime. Now you can take advantage of intellisense, syntax...

Our Microsoft Research team in Cambridge, UK have recently spoken with the kids over at Channel 9 about their functional language, F#. If you're interested in programming in a functional way rather than imperative (looking a the world through function...

This looks very interesting and still has a cool name! Sandcastle http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E82EA71D-DA89-42EE-A715-696E3A4873B2&displaylang=en Documentation Compilers For Managed Class Libraries Enabling managed...

Anders Hejlsberg (.NET Language innvoation) and Sam Drucker (Data access programmability layer) got together to discuss the new Language-intergrated query (LINQ) as it relates to ADO.NET on channel 9 this week . A theoretical overview of LINQ and how...

If you are involved with setting up or administering computers in a shared network - like an internet cafe or a community computer centre - then you'll be familiar with the difficulty in trying to maintain a consistent look and feel to each of the PCs...

I particularly like the raised front of the new ergo-keyboard. Check out some photos here and the info here .

Give me one - now! http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=60737

I'm sure most of you would've seen this before but I thought it was useful. Download this free tool to capture detailed performance counter information and produce reports to help do root-cause analysis on your Windows Server 2003 machines. It's the Microsoft...

I found this quite amusing take on how information is collected for MSN's Virtual Earth service and thought it blog worthy.

The guys at Channel 9 have come up with another brilliant video interview - this time one of the developers on the Avalon team ( Daniel Lehenbauer ) walks us through what Avalon is and how you would assemble and render a 3D enabled windows application...

I had to post about this. I'm sure it's been seen on blogs.msdn but I just finished watching the Channel 9 four part stream with NT Kernel Architect - Dave Probert. Check out the parts here . He gets deep into the guts of the kernel including the object...

I was in a meeting with our VS Team System devloper group and had to quickly post about a "geek-shirt" I saw there. I'm sure you've all heard of the famous manly S.S.S. morning ritual of "Shi*, shower and shave". Here's the product developer equivalent...

I went to an interesting talk on eMarketing here last week and was stunned to here of the growth rate of our MSDN targeted download notfifcation service. I must confess to have seeing it on the web site but ignoring it. Basically, rahter than checking...

Well, I’m into my third week here at Redmond . It’s been quite a buzz to date I can tell you. I’ve had two pretty urgent projects fall on my desk from day 1 and I’m grateful for being an international transfer rather than a new starter to Microsoft because...

The sunny shores of Lake Washington have welcomed me with open arms - no really - it's been quite good weather here and the sun has been out more often than not. The locals think they're in a drought as they only had 4 days of rainf or all of February...

It’s with a great deal of excitement I blog today about my new job within Microsoft. I’ve applied for and subsequently accepted an offer for a role with Microsoft Corp. in Redmond , Washington . I’ll be a Product Manager looking after customer and partner...

I've just finished downloading and running the beta of our new AntiSpyware software. The software scans your machine, installls agents to monitor your machine and removes any discovered threats. I must say I was pretty impressed with the interface and...

2005 already.... I feel there's been quite a shadow cast over the festive season thanks to the mother of all Tsunami's hitting the shores of countless countries whose coast line touch the Indian ocean. It's really difficult to imagine the impact on the...

Web Services Enhancements (WSE) is a vehicle for Microsoft to get the most recent implementation of the WS-* specifications out to our developers. Eventually, all of the WS specs will be supported inside of Indigo, until then, we bring out these API’s...

Well I was shocked to find I hadn’t posted to my blog for aaaages – bad me. The Australian DPE team in conjunction with some of our MVP’s, RD’s and partners delivered the Whidbey (VS 2005) Ascend (early adopter stage 2) training (I think you know what...

MSDN has recently published an interesting article on the use of Digital Ink Signatures. It covers how to capture a signature and the implications of storing same. Useful for human workflow applications with a Tablet PC endpoint. By the way, you can get...

I know this is an old feature but I can't tell you the number of times I've been looking at the screen of a colleague, customer or friends' LCD/laptop screen and they aren't using font smoothing technology built into Windows XP - ClearType . It happened...