Microsoft will be the first to provide a comprehensive "Private" Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering based on the current Windows Azure Platform, called the " Windows Azure Platform Appliance ". If you know anything about Windows Azure, just take all...

Here is a quick/simple 5-step migration of an existing ASP.NET web application and SQL Server database to Windows Azure “Web Roles” and SQL Azure. It’s intended to be a very simple demonstration to convey the concept and tools used.  It does NOT...

The Power of Choice Over the years, education has evolved with the decades of change in software platforms and IT. The platform paradigms shifted from the mainframe/midrange, client-server, web/mobile, and services oriented infrastructure/architecture...

As we move towards commercial availability, the evangelism team have started to release the next round of training & readiness materials onto channel 9. See here to get started: http://channel9.msdn.com/azure/ to get started or check out the following...

Having to host, manage, monitor, and scale databases comes at a cost.  In Education there is a almost a new need to host a new database daily with often unpredictable growth and scale requirements.  Image you want to post student achievement...

I’m a retired US Marine Corps veteran of foreign wars, so when I bought this bottle of “Jarhead Red” wine the other day, I was touched by the underlining benefits.  The proceeds go toward the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation who provide educational...

With already tight budgets in Education, these hard economic times add an extra burden that force IT decision makers to be ever more creative to offset costs and turn IT cost centers into IT enablers for the Business of Education as well as the Teaching...

Interesting little error I got while attempting to Delete Snapshot Subtree in Hyper-V Manager . I was able to delete every snapshot, but the first one in my tree which would then throw this error message ( 'MySnapshot' unable to remove snapshot ...)....

Test Driven Development (TDD) has long been advocated as a "best practice" in software development. Without picking apart the details with this theory, I'll just summarize the concept: prior to jumping in with both feet, writing functional code...

If you are interested in testing your web applications, Visual Studio offers a great way to do this without bolt-on or expensive 3rd party tools. Auto-record, configure, and even generate coded versions (C# or VB) of your web tests, then reuse with/without...

Here is a cool plug-in for Live Writer from James Clarke ( http://www.clarkezone.net/default.aspx?channelid=fe2866cb-00b9-4bff-bb11-1b3a88708a84 ). Notice I can now just select "Silverlight Streaming Application" from the Insert menu option. ...

Most blogs, books, articles, etc... provide some nice sample code, but they all assume that the user is logged on to Sharepoint as a Site Admin or someone with "Full Control" privileges. :-) What if you need to do something to the currently logged...

When considering a migration from ColdFusion to ASP.NET, you have several options to consider, I’ve touched on just a few here... Migration options: Re-write… which is really more like drag-and-drop and configure properties than it is re...

Here I have compiled a list of resources to assist anyone interested in making a migration from classic ASP to ASP.NET. If you wish to skip the details below here are a few summarized pointers. In my humble opinion the easiest approach (using migration...

After some extensive research I could not find a good example of how I could receive an Email via the POP3 Adapter for Biztalk Server 2006 R2 that completely parsed out the header content (To, From, Subject, CC, etc...) and the Body (I don't parse the...

In just 1 week from today, on April 8, 2008, the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE will no longer be supported . If you haven't converted all your apps to .NET shame on you (I mean that in a pure-poor-humor sort of way, in fact it's widely recognized that migrations...

Two things that you might encounter while you are attempting to create your schema for your SQL Adapter using the "SQL Transport Schema Generation Wizard": One thing that seems to be a common problem, is the SQL Transport Schema Generation Wizard...

If you are developing against a local SQL Server 2005 database in Visual Studio you may not notice this error message until you attempt to access an ASP.NET page that attempts to read or write to your database from an external client (or browser not launch...

If you were an early adopter and/or just testing out Team Foundation Server 2008 and now want to upgrade to a licensed copy without reinstalling on new hardware see this MSDN article for the appropriate steps: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library...

Here I’ll give you a quick introduction to LINQ using Visual Studio 2008. Click here to learn more about LINQ in general, otherwise download a 90-day trial Visual Studio 2008 (if you are a student you can download the professional edition for FREE ) and...

Consider this a pre-post... I received a lot of questions in regards to the integration of VS 2008 and SQL 2008. As of the current date SQL 2008 was just released as a CTP while VS 2008 has already be made publically available. The main things that folks...

I have created two sets of step-by-step instructions. The first is for someone who may be already somewhat familiar with using ADAM and ADAM tools, the second is for those who would prefer a little more detail. Here is the first set of step-by-step...

For Education and Government customers, Academic Developers, and Public Sector ISVs, we (Microsoft) are inviting you to attend a day of Developer-Oriented technical sessions, featuring Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server and Microsoft.NET 3.0 (formerly...

It may be no surprise that there is considerable interest these days for both Private and Public Sector organizations to standardize on Application/Development Platforms; however what is “somewhat” surprising – is how little the “vendor lock-in” argument...

Since I'm always talking to Education institutions (both K-12 and Higher Ed) about .NET Development Tools and Technologies, I thought it would good to share a blog posted from a good friend and former colleague (Alex Lowe) about Students using ASP.NET...