John Bristowe's Weblog

As part of the new "Architecture Thursdays", Microsoft Regional Director Scott Howlett and Karen McGregor from MSDN Canada will be delivering a pretty cool webcast on Thursday, February 16, 2006. This webcast will describe the architecture behind Toronto...

James Kovacs : Lutz Roeder just released Reflector 4.2 . I love Reflector. A wonderful utility for .NET developers everywhere.

Greg Reinacker has cooked up an image aggregator prototype for NewsGator . Very cool stuff. I ran his implementation against my unread items earlier tonight and discovered many images that grabbed my attention. As a result, I ended up reading a few interesting...

Mistakes can and often will happen in software development. When they do, it's useful to have a means of backing out those mistakes. With projects in Team Foundation Server (TFS) (Beta 3), such a means exists in the form the utility, TFSDeleteProject...

Today, I'm in Vancouver where I'll be delivering a presentation on Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) to the Software QA Vancouver User Group, also known as VanQ . Here's the session abstract: Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) helps to ensure quality...

On Wednesday, January 25, the Calgary .NET User Group will be hosting its first event of 2006. This session will run from 5 PM to 8 PM and will star the VSTS guru himself; Joel Semeniuk . (Joel is a Microsoft Regional Director , a Microsoft MVP , and...

Julie Lerman : "It is much more effective and satisfying than spending any more time googling (or msdn-ing) this problem." I'm happy to hear that Julie was able to get her problem resolved through Microsoft Support . I've called them three times in...

Jeff Beehler hits us again with another update about the upcoming Team Foundation Server Release Candidate . Lots of great fixes in the next release!

From "Man, That Took Too Long to Post" Department: Plumbers at Work , Episode 2 - Right Planet, Wrong Universe is now up on Community Radio at MSDN Canada . Also, we've fixed the RSS feed to the show (subscribe here ). Here's the show notes for...

Microsoft Regional Director and .NET wonk, Scott Hanselman has just completed the first episode of Hanselminutes .

Once again, MSDN Canada is hosting an inter-user group competition . If you and your friends enjoy coding and have got some wicked ideas around applications then this is your chance to win some cool prizes for your efforts. Do you have what it takes?...

I am a developer at heart. However, I find it both interesting and useful to read about issues facing IT professionals today. That's why I subscribed to the Microsoft TechNet Magazine last year. This is a wonderful publication that's similar to the MSDN...

Thom Robbins has posted a screencast to Channel 9 . In his latest screencast (located here ), Thom provides an overview of Web Services and support for building Web Services in Visual Studio 2005. (The running time is about 18 minutes.)

Earlier today, the Patterns & Practices group at Microsoft released Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 2.0 . Enterprise Library represents a collection of composable & reusable application blocks that provide implementations of commonly-used...

On Wednesday, February 8th, the Calgary .NET User Group and the Alberta .NET User Group will host the INETA User Group Visual Studio 2005 Launch event. This extended 3-hour session will highlight many of the new features of Visual Studio 2005. (Please...

What are you doing on Saturday, March 18, 2006?

Canadian Microsoft Regional Director Derek Hatchard and friends have launched the Ardent Dev Blog . One particularly interesting aspect of this launch is the introduction of its Ask the Experts page. Essentially, it's a page that you can go to and ask...

Slashdot : Mike Nash , Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Security Technology Unit, has agreed to answer 12 of the highest-moderated questions you submit here. ( Read more... )

Paint.NET continues to impress. Earlier today, v2.6 Beta 2 was released and thanks to its built-in auto-update facility, I had the latest bits up & running in seconds. Rick Brewster has a summary of the changes made for this release posted here .

Microsoft PressPass Announcement Microsoft today marked a milestone on the path toward completing the Windows Vista programming model, WinFX, by announcing the availability of Go Live licenses for Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow...

Jeff Beehler : ... we're planning on releasing our TFS [Team Foundation Server] Release Candidate in early February... Great news, especially for those who want to incorporate TFS today; we will support migrating your existing data to the v1.0 bits...

The Why Visual Studio portal has been launched on MSDN , including guided tours !

It's coming. April 24-27, 2006. The Super Early Bird Deadline is February 15, 2006. More information is available from the VSLive! Toronto Web site .

Windows Live now provides a service for storing your browser favorites up in the cloud. Check it out . Very helpful when moving between machines.