It’s been an amazing 9 1/2 years working with Microsoft, especially the last three in Microsoft Ireland.  I have met and worked with incredible people and built interesting and fun projects.  So it was after a lot of consideration that I have...

If you’re working on Windows Phone 7 applications, you’d probably love to be able to deploy and test your app on a shiny, Windows 7 phone.  I have three upcoming opportunities for you to do so: * Irish Open Spaces Coding Day: http://codingday.org...

Related to my previous post, I wanted to mention that if you’re building Windows Phone 7 apps, there will be phones available to use and deploy on at Irish Open Spaces Coding Day on September 11th at the Enterprise Ireland offices in Dublin.  You...

Last night ALT.NET and Dublin MTUG held a joint event in the Radisson Blu hotel in Dublin city centre to show off Windows Phone 7 and talk about building applications and games. Despite being serenaded by an ice cream truck, deafened by alarm sirens and...

I had an amazing time last week at NCI’s dotConf event in the IFSC.  From their hilarious kick off Lego video to a great speaker line-up to a very fun after party to celebrate their newly launched MSc in Web Technologies, the folks at NCI know how...

Every year, my team spends the month of June pretty much in hiding.  It’s not that we don’t like you, we just have to take some “us time.” Our fiscal year ends on June 30th, so we spend June looking at how we’ve done for the year.  Did we reach...

I’m delighted to announce that the team behind Windows Phone 7 is visiting Dublin on June 3rd to conduct a free developer workshop. The workshop will cover building applications for Windows Phone 7 in both Silverlight & XNA. Here’s...

We’ve had such amazing visiting speakers lately, and joining us shortly is Jesse Liberty , self-confirmed Silverlight Geek. Jesse is visiting Dublin, Belfast and Cork to talk about Silverlight development, and as Jesse has created a lot of the training...

Many of you have already received e-mail invites from us or from community organizations about the Visual Studio 2010 Launch events here in Ireland and Northern Ireland, so this is just a quick update about the events. We have a few prizes for folks who...

I get a lot of feedback from people that they have a hard time finding out about various tech events in Ireland & Northern Ireland.  For Microsoft developers, we have mtug.ie, dublinalt.net, microsoft.ie and a variety of other sources for tech...

Just a quick post as I’ve gotten several e-mails asking for my WordCamp Ireland slides. The slides can be downloaded here: http://www.slideshare.net/martharotter/free-tools-for-wordpress-users-from-microsoft My talk was “Free Tools for WordPress Sites...

If you’ve seen me at all in the last few weeks, I’ve probably been gushing about MIX10 .  Now in its fifth year, MIX is the Microsoft event I’ve been dying to go to, year after year. And now I’m here, in Las Vegas.  And MIX10 starts in around...

Thanks to everyone who came along to our BizSpark Camp event last week at the Radisson.  The feedback from the sessions and the PitchSlam event was fantastic, so we really appreciate everyone’s support! After the event, I received an absolute *flood...

Everything is locked and loaded for BizSparkCamp Dublin on March 8th at the Radisson Hotel on Golden Lane. As part of the local BizSpark programme, Microsoft Ireland , Enterprise Ireland and TechLudd are delighted to announce BizSparkCamp 2010 featuring...

Even though I’m in love with my Zune 120, when I learned that I could be writing multi-touch games in XNA for the Zune HD, it didn’t take much to convince me (the recent price drop plus Bing cash back helped, too).  I probably would have bought one...

The “ Discover Your National Library ” exhibit I blogged about here has now been on display for over a month, and it’s getting some serious attention from people all over. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed it hit the Silverlight.net front page (!) which...

I know we’ve all been calling it the Zune Phone for a while now, but whatever it is it’s public news and it’s gorgeous.  I’ve been getting a few questions about writing applications for it, so I thought I’d throw this out there.  MIX is traditionally...

About a year and a half ago, Josh Holmes visited Dublin from the US on a whirlwind tour of Europe to talk with developers about rich, interactive applications. Josh spoke with developers from all over Ireland and from all different backgrounds. He’s a...

  On Wednesday January 20th, the National Library launched a brand new exhibition on Kildare Street called “Discover Your National Library.”   It’s a fantastic exhibit, not just because of the wealth of the collection of rare books, manuscripts...

I am thrilled that Tim Heuer is coming to visit Dublin to kick off the Dublin Microsoft Technology User Group’s first meeting of 2010! As a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft for the Silverlight Team, Tim joins us for a talk about What’s New in Silverlight...

The annual XNA competition, Dream.Build.Play, closes its registration at the end of today (January 18th). If winning $100,000 sounds pretty good to you and you have a great idea for a killer Xbox 360 game, check out http://www.dreambuildplay.com . ...

Want to learn about some exciting new developments in XNA?  Would you like to hear live from experts?  Starting this month, the Developer Talk Series by the XNA Creators Club hosts monthly discussions with expert developers and people working...

I have received a lot of e-mails about the Silverlight Jumpstart program for January.  While I’m writing back to everyone, I wanted to post an update to let you know what’s going on with it. Unfortunately due to resources and time being low on the...

This is a bit last-minute, as I only recently found out about it but I wanted to add it for anyone who is doing SharePoint work.  There is a training event this week from January 11th – January 15th at BT Training Solutions. The five day training...

Not mine, Microsoft’s! Microsoft is sporting a shiny new official blog here:  http://blogs.technet.com/microsoft_blog/ .  This blog aims to “cover and add context around the top level news from the company and industry.”  I know a lot of...