The Liquidator blog is moving - go check out http://markcarrollnz.wordpress.com/ For those of you who don’t know as a result of Microsoft’s steps to manage costs announced in January 2009 the role I have filled for the last five and a half years...

Wow – talk about value for money ! This conference is being organised by the NZ Sharepoint user group community – for a two day conference it represents incredible value at only $500 per head. Highlights; - 36 Sessions including 3 streams; ...

Mike Zeff, Nigel Parker and Nathan Mercer are hitting the road again to bring you the latest and greatest around Windows 7, Windows server 2008 R2 and Silverlight. There are two streams for this roadshow – The Technet Stream and the MSDN Stream. Locations...

Every year we run a series of architect forums for folk who are interested in getting some basic insights into developing their skills so as they can either become an architect or develop their existing architect skills. The sessions are being held...

If your into Visual Studio Team system or thinking about it then check out this link to the free ALM Catalyst Live Workshops series. These workshops consist of four two-hour interactive workshops that are repeated over a period of sixteen weeks...

Heads up ! - the excellent Mr Nathan Mercer is doing the rounds again this time focusing on Windows 7. This is a must if your into all things Tech Net and comes highly recommended for developers and architects as well. Lets face it most of us will...

Data Protection Manager 2007 Technical Briefing This technical briefing focuses on Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 – a member of the Microsoft System Centre family of management products. If you are an IT Administrator that works with...

OK OK I know April 1 is usually a day associated with making people look stupid (April fools and all that) but if you are a developer, have staff who are developers or want the anonymity of the web to brush up on some developer skills then Virtual Tech...

MSDN UNPLUGGED continues in February 09 with South Island locations. We will be sharing principles, practices, patterns and tools announced at PDC in October. Come and join us to start your applications journey to the cloud and beyond. Presented by Microsoft...

Susie Adams is the CTO of Microsoft's US federal arm. In this short interview , published in Infoworld, Susie Adams makes a number of excellent points and observations that strike a chord for me personally having worked both alongside and inside public...

Speaking personally – ‘Big Deals for Me’ of 2008 I am starting the New Year with reflections on the year just gone in the form of three ‘big deals for me’ that came out of 2008. I’ll discuss each of these ‘Big Deals for Me’ , how they are inter-related...

I Admit to ‘slackery’. I know I’ve been a bit slack on the blogging lately – I’ve been really busy with a number of events and sessions for both our architect and developer community. Wow ! I have to ‘call out’ the Unplugged sessions which myself...

MSDN UNPLUGGED Developer Event: Take your Applications to the Cloud and Beyond – PDC, Visual Studio, Azure, Office 14 and Windows 7 Today we will be sharing principles, practices, patterns and tools announced at PDC in October. Come and join...

Just announced today - ... Patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0 Beta 2 . It’s our Microsoft Playbook for Application Architecture . This is our guide to help solution architects and developers make the most of the Microsoft...

Following up on my Team system user group talk on Power Tools earlier this year I am stoked to see that the new edition of power tools previewed earlier in Brian Harry's blog here have now been released and are available for download here . These Power...

This guide in BETA1 form is a document that will help with both the understanding and execution of acceptance testing. It provides useful role definitions, process models and decision making guidance in a form that is relatively easy to digest compared...

Forget full drives, embrace "The Cloud" (1:58) is the name of a clip which appeared on TV ONE news this evening. There is a linkage between this clip and our next series of architect events scheduled for November through February. This clip...

For those of you who have never been to an unplugged event before they are a lot like our architect forums but with a more operational ‘hands on’ focus. They have been running for just over a year now and have proven to be very popular. In current...

Following on from last month’s Architect Forums with Matti Seikkula which showed the use of Virtual Earth, SQL 2008 spatial and Silverlight I promised a number of folk that I’d blog when Silverlight 2 actually becomes available. The answer is Tuesday...

I get asked reasonably often - "How can I use Team Foundation server (TFS) to support Sharepoint application development?” Guidance is now available on MSDN which promises to help you provide an integrated development environment and single source...

One month after after our NZ Team system users group talk on Visual Studio Team system power Tools, over on Brian Harry's blog there is a new post previewing the next TFS Power tools release . Here are seven good reasons to talk with your Team system...

I will be covering some of this material in a fortcoming New Zealand Team system Users group session later this year. In the meantime this session is well worth watching as an early 'heads-up' for what is coming in Visual Studio Team System 10 (aka Rosario...

Title: Just like being there – Combining video with geo-spatial data by Matti Seikkula Combining the visualisation of being there with the knowledge of where you are and with relevant information about that particular location is a powerful concept...

These Unplugged sessions by Nigel Parker are very much complimentary to the current series of Architect forums. We figured it would make sense to showcase some excellent work done with Silverlight via the architect forums at the same time Nigel was discussing...

I always feel a bit guilty about the amount of stuff we do via the MS Architect community for Infrastructure architects as oppossed for the Strategic and Solutions lot. The excellent Mr Nathan Mercer, just back from his gig in Singapore, is holding...