Managed to squeeze in a little bit more tinkering with the Windows Home Server and Media Center set-up this weekend. First of all, the WHS had updated itself to include Power Pack 3 . The main benefits of this are the integration into the Windows 7 Libraries...

At this time of year, my mind begins to wander towards "what to cook for Christmas lunch". (There is the small business of the birth of Holmes Baby 2.0 to contend with in the next couple of weeks too). Last year, the village lost it's electrical...

Here's a handy list for you to get your fill of Azure related content from PDC . Getting Started Lap Around the Windows Azure Platform Windows Azure Present and Future Introduction to Building Applications with Windows Azure The Business of Windows Azure...

Before they headed off to PDC, Mike and Paul headed to Oxford (almost the same weather - takes about the same time to get there too given the ring road) to talk to Chris Lintott and Arfon Smith about the GalaxyZoo.org project which is a "Citizen...

Just when you think you've escaped the Unified Communications net (THEY CAN ALWAYS FIND YOU!) for five minutes to have a look at Facebook, up pops another buddy - Stu McCarthy - to tell me he's just finished work on EyeOnEarth.eu . Seems like a bunch...

Also in the PDC excitement, we announced the availability of Office 2010 Beta which you can find here . Aside from the main client itself (I've been using a version of that for a couple of months - Sparklines FTW !), there are some other things that are...

I loved the keynotes at PDC this year - although as I was trying to edit the Day 1 keynote from 2.25 hours to 30 mins for the #MWord event I wasn't loving it so much. That said, the thing about editing is that you really have to listen and get behind...

If you didn't catch the keynote from PDC 09 today then you can see the on-demand stream here shortly . This year the keynote was streamed with Silverlight Smooth Streaming : my experience was very good - didn't miss a beat in two hours - and there seemed...

What an awesome set of 12 tutorials!

In the latest - and hopefully final - part of the Media Center saga, I've also pushed a second Hauppauge WinTV-HVR4000 card into the machine so I get the multi-channel recording from the satellite channels I can receive (a la Sky+). Phew - just in time...

I bought a replacement netbook recently: my old MSI Wind didn't really have the battery life I wanted but it worked fine otherwise. Picking a netbook should be fairly straightforward as the specs are all the same but I was particularly attracted to the...

Tremendous video from Dolly Parton (that's some website by the way) in which she talks about the virtues of IE8 and gives us a technical backgrounder in web slices. "Hell - I didn't even know there was a one through seven"

Brad Abrams recently put together an epic set of blog posts on RIA Services with Silverlight . Since then, it seems that he's been busy working on a microsite from the main Silverlight site focused on RIA Services . Nice work, and should be a handy hub...

If you're a fan of Paint.NET then you'll be pleased to hear that the 3.5 version has been released. There are a bunch of new features and fixes listed on the blog post.

Just noticed that the WebPI now has the Silverlight Toolkit as an install option (it's the October 2009 version). You can still get it from CodePlex too , but this is a handy option for removing that extra bit of friction.

I recently got my hands on a Windows Azure and SQL Azure token to try out a little cloud goodness. The challenge I set myself was to host an ASP.NET MVC application (including data) in the cloud. Hopefully just an hour or so of fiddling about, but as...