The Microsoft Technology Center in Germany developed a managed wrapper for COM Interfaces of IE Plugins. It works with IE7 and IE8, is targeted at Express Editions (Both C# and VB.NET) but also works with the other versions of VS. The project is called...

While evaluating the latest RIA services I followed this walkthrough . Not sure what I did wrong but trying out the POCO – aka plain old CLR objects - example with Cities I could not get the data down to the client and figured a simple problem was causing...

Today I finished a webcast on the latest features of my Currency Converter. In the video I show the usage of localstorage as well some jquery features. Let me know what you think.

Mike Taulty built a nice app to show controls available for WPF and Silverlight. And finally it is now also working on my 64bit Windows7 machine.

I recorded a webcast about the Currency Converter Accelerator that I developed. The stream is powered by Microsoft Silverlight Streaming .

Michael developed that cool demo where he uses the power of the client to access devices through bluetooth. What he did is a very nice way of showing the beauty of our technology stack ... I personally had never thought of connecting Nintendo WII controls...

I wrote an IE8 accelerator which can be found at http://ie8.brianas.de and is also registered at http://www.ieaddons.com/en/details/other/Currencty_Converter/

As the hosting business is a low margin business support cost is a very critical area that they want to have as low as possible. In many low-end offerings you actually don’t have any support other than calling high priced hotlines. If you do get support...

If you go to www.microsoft.com/saas you will end up with the definition: “Software deployed as a Service and accessed using Internet technologies”. To me this is very broad probably too broad. Unfortunately I don’t have anything clearer and more precise...

Many hosters make their money servicing consumers in a low margin business. Many of them have a business brand like Cohaesio vs. Surftown or Schlund&Partner vs. 1&1. I’m not sure how realistic a scenario would be where a hoster would give up...

In a hosted environment an application will not have the full freedom of choosing it’s runtime behavior and the way it is being provisioned. There are many policies defined in a hosted environment that need to be enforced from the service provider. Therefore...

Michel Baladi posted a lot of information on the outcome of our efforts regarding the SaaS Delivery platform in his blog. You can find the information at blogs.msdn.com/baladi

The two most significant innovations which came out of the Architecture sessions are those two manifests. The application manifest is something built by the software vendor to actually define the needs of an application in a hosted environment. It contains...

We discussed the shared database approach or multi-tenant data layer and came to the conclusion that running backups is not so much of a problem but restoring data on a tenant by tenant basis would be a complex pattern that is not supported currently...

with the nex posts I'd like to share some of my experiences with Software as a Service. They are intended to be a basis for a discussion and my very personal view.

I'm actually using them myself and find them one of the most useful resources that I'm aware of. Check them out at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/events/nuggets.aspx .

this week I had the great pleasure to speak about Ajax and WPF/E in Dubai in front of students from various universities around UAE. Honestly I was very nervous presenting in a country with a culture that I did not know. Actually it turned out that the...

WPF/E Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere December CTP has been released Dec 4th. You can find information here . Have a look at Scott Guthries blog where the announcement can be found.

Today I started my first trip to Estonia where I'll be speaking to students about Web2.0 and related SaaS engagements I'm currently doing. Additionally I'll give an overview on ASP.net AJAX We will also visit a hoster this week.

Presentations from this conference are available here .

With a first ADS (Architectural Design Session) at the Microsoft Innovation Center in Denmark we stepped into a very interesting space. In October we spent three days together with a hoster and a software vendor discussing opportunities and technologies...

check it out at www.microsoft.com/hosting

Check out Quentin Clark's blog about WinFS and the article about ADO.NET Entity Data Model.

It is called "Architecture Strategies for Catching the Long Tail" and for me it is the best paper about this topic so far - and I like the the way Frederick Chong and Gianpaolo Carraro view the SaaS world with a mixture of de-mystification and what the...

Wow! Having read through those papers I might not be able to retain and not taste it ;-) It really looks promising. It can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/future/ For people who are interested in ASP.net check out Scott Guthries blog...