The reason I’m blogging about this is that I was trying to do this the other day and I struggled to find the relevant information from ALL of the major search engines – including the one I work on . Now it could be that I was using the wrong search terms...

Not that anyone is really paying attention, but I recently realized I hadn’t updated the world with what I’m currently working on. One of my last posts was to explain I was leaving Microsoft for pastures new, but that didn’t last very long! I did actually...

Summary I wrote a Google Spreadsheet at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApeEYUovh8d9dE04QjJnLW5CLTVrSVNtZkEzVU92NXc&hl=en that calculates the MSFT share price in UK Pounds I wrote a Python script running on Google App Engine that takes the...

I think most people who know me personally by now know that I’m very shortly moving on from Microsoft to pastures new. For everyone else, I thought I should briefly explain what’s going on and what I’ll be doing next. Basically the...

I've been working on my friend Josie's website and was looking for a simple solution for her to be able to post news, updates etc. without too much technical knowledge. After looking around a loads of different blogging sites, software and stuff somewhere...

I love my Garmin 275 nüvi ! I’ve always put off buying a SatNav as it somehow seems a sign of weakness to not know where you are, but now I have one I wouldn’t be without it. What I also like is the integration with Windows Live Maps...

I’ve always used the Windows Live Toolbar to sync favorites across my multiple machines, so it was a bit disappointing when the previous beta removed that functionality with the demise of http://favorites.live.com That meant I was pleased to see the service...

The next stage in my plan to let the whole world know where I am has been to hook up my Fire Eagle location to Twitter, so every time my location changes a Tweet is sent to everyone following me . I thought for a while about hooking up my code to Twitter...

Not that you’d really notice, but I’ve updated the code to show my current location on the map on this blog to use Fire Eagle to store my current location. If you haven’t heard of it before, Fire Eagle is a service provided by Yahoo! which lets you store...

I got this tip in the pub on Friday from my friend Bobby who works on the MSDN team. He told me he’d worked on implementing a low bandwidth version of the site, which is simpler and much, much faster than usual view. I’d never heard of this, but a...

As I’m often switching location between my home in the UK and working out in Redmond, I’ve been thinking for a while about how best to easily let people know where I am. As you can hopefully see, I’ve added a map to every page on this blog and I thought...

We found an interesting issue today regarding our use of pre-compiled ASP.Net websites that I thought I would share, as we learnt something that we didn’t know before. In our particular setup (for reasons too complicated to go into here), we have an...

Well “relaunch” is a little grand, but I thought I’d try to make a bit better use of this blog. The plan is to try to post more regularly, still trying to share code or ideas I’ve found useful which hopefully others may find useful too. Looking back...

As usual, this may well be common knowledge but I found this useful. In a stored procedure we were passing in a parameter (say @maxRows) which we wanted to use to dynamically limit the number of rows returned by the query. For ages we couldn't find a...

I don't do much client-side JavaScript programming, and I've always had intermittent issues when trying to attach a Visual Studio debugger to a instance of IE when I'm trying to figure out what's going on. However in August 2007's MSDN Magazine (doesn...

I found the following page interesting when having issues setting a value in a SqlParameter constructor. From http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0881fz2y.aspx : When you specify an Object in the value parameter, the SqlDbType is inferred...

Recently had some issues setting up some custom perf counters to install and run from an ASP.Net page that I thought I'd share. We began by using the information in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555129 which states: "It turns out that the permission...

Is this a well known trick and I'm just completely out of touch? Probably, but I was very excited when I found out that holding down CTRL when clicking a link in IE7 will open the link in a new tab. To think all this time I was using right click and...

I was struggling to install some new software (the superb new Live Local 3D view - I had an early internal beta already installed) and then remembered a handy tip. To find all currently installed MSIs, use the (hidden) folder c:\windows\ Installer...

As I've posted before, I really don't like the Visual Studio interface for running unit tests. This is mainly because it's not as clean (no hierarchy tree or big green line!), makes a copy of the files every time a test is run and is pretty slow (probably...

Reasonably often I find myself writing a mini-test harness when I want to run a console application and time how long it takes. I always end up looking back through old code to remember how to do it, so this makes it very suitable for posting here...

I'm now working on the Windows Live Expo team, which means: I might have some more interesting things to post on here :-) The focus of this blog may change a little We shipped our first public beta yesterday (US only for posting at the moment...

This one surprised me a lot when we found it. You can reboot a computer that is running IIS remotely by running the command: iisreset [computerName] /reboot It's been very useful today when we've been patching a whole rack of servers with security...

I'm not 100% convinced that the unit test framework in VS2005 is a step forward from using NUnit. I don't like the interface (in a shallow way I really like the progress bar of NUnit, and the feeling of well-being it gives when it goes green!), and...

I had some strange issues on my laptop with Visual Studio 2005 - the delete and return keys didn't work, which made it somewhat tricky to write code. I even resorted to copy and pasting a new line when writing code, which as you can imagine wasn't very...