Here are my notes from the Steven Sinofsky keynote at BUILD . Keynote started with a video of developers, designers etc. working on Windows 8 giving their favorite features in Win8. ~450 million copies of Win7 sold (1500 non-security product changes seamlessly...

I'm down in LA (OK, Anaheim actually...) for the BUILD Windows 8 conference - what was previously known as the " Professional Developers' Conference " (PDC) - not sure if the fact that it's changed names means that they want a broader appeal beyond just...

For the auction at my kid’s school, I volunteered to set up a simple web site to be able to review items available; there is no online bidding at present.  I decided to use the BidNow Azure sample as a base for this, figuring it will also give me...

For a client engagement, I was provided VMWare images.  I don’t have VMWare, but have a server running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V.  So I needed a conversion from the VMWare image to a Hyper-V image. As is often the case, I figured I...

I have a large spreadsheet I’ve gotten from a colleague.  To help categorize it for a pivot table, I added a column which is “group”.  I then added a table in a different sheet that mapped people to groups – and used the VLOOKUP function in...

I’ve just been listening to Ed Norton interviewing Bruce Springsteen at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this fall at the premiere of the movie “The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’”.  One of the comments Springsteen made in...

For a consulting project, I recently had to join my laptop to an Active Directory domain at a client's workplace. Suddenly, my home computers can no longer see the computer. I found that the laptop could see shared items on my home network, though. ...

I noticed a while ago that my Outlook 2010 connected over IMAP to my company email and Outlook Connector for MSN to my personal Hotmail account was always in the process of trying to send messages – even when I hadn’t written a message.  This started...

I’m doing some performance testing on Azure tracing to figure out the overhead of trace statements in code, especially when the tracing level is such that the statement does nothing – but clearly it has to do something to figure out to do nothing. ...

There’s an interesting article about performance of server apps in the July 2010 Communications of the ACM somewhat provocatively titled “You’re Doing It Wrong”. In it, Poul-Henning Kamp, the architect of an HTTP cache called Varnish...

To fix a problem with a corrupted Outlook profile , I created a new profile which caused all my Contacts to be initialized from my Windows Live account. Pretty much everything came in OK, but one of the annoying things is that the “default mailing...

I use the Outlook Connector for MSN to access my MSN mail, calendar and contacts in Outlook 2010.  I also have a separate SMTP/POP account for my business which I read in Outlook.  It’s nice to have all the email in one place so I don’t miss...

I’ve come across a good new blog, Coding Horror , written by Jeff Atwood, one of the founders of one of my favorite coding sites, Stack Overflow .  In reading through some of the older posts, I came across one that is close to my heart which is on...

Windows makes available a wide variety of performance counters which of course are available to your Azure roles and can be accessed using the Azure Diagnostics APIs as I described in my recent MSDN article on Windows Azure Diagnostics . However, it can...

One of the practices I advise with Windows Azure services (and really any service) is self-monitoring to find problems that may not be fatal but are indications of serious problems developing. I happened to run across a good example of how to do this...

My MSDN Magazine article on diagnostics and logging in Windows Azure is now available in the June 2010 issue and online. There was some material that I didn’t have space to include or that I’ve learned since submitting the final revision of this to MSDN...

For a consulting project, I’ve been playing around with getting the Skype public API to work with Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (RDS) by building a DSS service that communicates with Skype. I’ve gotten this working and wanted to use the Visual Programming...

As part of a project I’m doing for a Seattle startup, I’m playing with Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (RDS).  I downloaded the 2008 release and generated a simple program to use a desktop joystick (basically a UI element displayed on the screen...

I am at the Azure Firestarter event in Redmond today which just finished with a panel discussion and Q&A.  Here are my notes. Q: For Dallas, do I need to use C# to access the data? A: No - it's pretty easy to use C# classes but Dallas exposes...

I am at the Azure Firestarter event in Redmond today and just heard Mark Kottke talk about his experiences as an app development consultant with Microsoft on migrating existing customer apps to Azure.  Here are my notes; slides and sample code are...

I am at the Azure Firestarter event in Redmond today and just heard David Aiken from the Azure team give an overview of best practices for developing applications for the cloud along with some tips and tricks.  Here are my notes; slides and sample...

I am at the Azure Firestarter event in Redmond today and just heard David Robinson from the SQL team give an overview of SQL Server for Azure.  Here are my notes; slides and sample code are to be posted later and I will update the post with them...

I am at the Azure Firestarter event in Redmond today and just heard Brad Calder give a quick overview of Azure data.  Here are my notes; slides and sample code are to be posted later and I will update the post with them when they are. Blobs REST...

I am at the Azure Firestarter event in Redmond today and just heard Steve Marx give a lap around the platform.  Here are my notes; slides and sample code are to be posted later and I will update the post with them when they are. Idea behind Azure...

I decided to write a PowerShell cmdlet to manage Windows Azure diagnostics.  This cmdlet will let you retrieve and delete log information in the Azure cloud for your service; right now there isn’t any easy way to do this. I started out by writing...