November, 2007

Today I went up to Belfast with Vincent Vergonjeanne and Liam Cronin to present at QuMIX '07. Mike McMeekin , who is a Microsoft Student Partner at Queen's University Belfast did a fabulous job setting up the afternoon, so special thanks go to him and...

I wasn't kidding about all of the cool stuff happening as soon as I'm gone! On Monday afternoon an updated version of the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha was released. This version will work with the RTM version of Visual Studio 2008. This means that all...

Yesterday in Trinity College something landed. Something big. Something new and fun. Something that might keep me up late at night... The XNA European Tour began right here in Dublin, filling two 150-person lecture halls for the entire day with 300+ students...

I flew back to Dublin yesterday from my hometown of St. Louis after spending a week at home for Thanksgiving. The question I get most from people in Ireland lately is, "Isn't Thanksgiving bigger in the United States than Christmas?" The answer is actually...

Man, I disappear for a few days and all the excitement happens! Not only did Microsoft ship Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 Monday , but the XNA team also released the Game Studio 2.0 Beta!! If you want to try it out, you can download it here and see...

Registration is open for Mix 2008 in Las Vegas from March 5th - March 7th at the Venetian: http://visitmix.com/2008 If you register by January 15th, you can get an early bird discounted price of $1095, saving $200 of the regular price. Mix sold out early...

On Monday I went to Cork to visit students at UCC. Despite some technical difficulties involving scheduling and room changes, Microsoft Student Partners Nathan Forde and Sarah Fitzgerald managed to get together a great crowd! We spent about a half hour...

I just went to weather.com to see what I should pack for my Thanksgiving trip home. I laughed out loud when I saw this: Um, Missouri is completely and ridiculously flat. I clicked on it anyway and unsurprisingly, there won't be good snow or skiing in...

I was thrilled that even though I have a first-gen Zune, I was eligible for the firmware update and all the great new things coming along with the launch of the new Zune. I didn't expect much, maybe just some polish and a website or marketplace overhaul...

This weekend Dublin had the pleasure of hosting Mashup Camp Europe for the first time ever. It was a two-part event divided over three days. The first part was Mashup University where organizations talked about their Mashup solutions and tools for customer...

A few new apps added this week to my top ten list: GOA WinForms for Silverlight: I have to give a lot of credit to Netika , who created the GOA WinForms for Silverlight . Someone showed me these applications last week at TechEd and I was blown away. Click...

I returned from Barcelona on Friday after about a week in one of my favorite cities enjoying TechEd Developers , Microsoft's annual conference for developers and other fun people. Ronan and I went along with around 40 or so fellow Irish to Spain, and...

One of the coolest new features released with the latest Windows Live Services is the Windows Live Messenger IM control . What this provides is a way for people to reach you when they don't have either a Windows Live ID or Messenger installed or something...

I know, I know, my life is tough. This week I'm in Barcelona to attend the Microsoft TechEd Developers conference (so if I'm behind a bit on e-mail, now you know why...). We're one day in to the conference so far, and I've already seen some great sessions...