Less than a week ago I spent 24 happy hours on a 747/400 in the care of Air New Zealand (who did a great job) returning from Auckland via Los Angeles. Along the way we enjoyed the fun experience that is US immigration - about an hour in a queue to get...

Two weeks in New Zealand and I feel I'm suitably qualified to sum up their people, culture and heritage in the following simple bullet points: When scenery was handed out, how come they got so much of it? It doesn't seem fair. Were all NZ architects...

Okay, that's it. I'm packing my bags and heading out of here for a couple of weeks. I just hope I don't have to ask for any directions in New Zealand as Melita was laughing at my pronounciation of place names earlier today. Well, except for the flight...

I recently got asked the question why, if you use the WebBrowser control in a WinForms app to display a PowerPoint presentation, a vertical scrollbar is displayed even if you set ScrollBarsEnabled = False. Well, I did a bit of digging... Try doing...

Thoroughly enjoyed DevWeek today and look forward to another day there tomorrow. Dave Wheeler's keynote and WPF sessions got an all round thumbs up and Jason Clark's session on Custom Controls in ASP.NET 2.0 was also very good (except for the font - Lucida...

I'm sure many of you will be familiar with the Monty Hall Problem , especially those of you who've read " The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time " but I was taken aback at the strength of feeling it provoked in a recent discussion at work....

This is a great opportunity to hear about some of the new security features in ASP.NET 2.0 and WSE 3.0. The event takes place at the Microsoft Offices in Thames Valley Park from 6pm on 8th March. You can sign up here Here's the abstract: "This...

My MSDN Nugget Finder Gadget for Live.com ( see this entry ) now works in both Firefox and IE. I'd not revisted this until a chance conversation earlier this week with a colleague (thanks Mark) sparked me back into action to fix it. After poking around...

If you've not heard about it already, Mix 06 is a new conference focussed on web technologies that takes place in Las Vegas from March 20-22nd. From the website: The MIX conference is a 72-hour conversation between Web developers, designers and business...

Last weekend some I went along to The Bearcat Comdey Club in St Margarets (TW1) with some friends. I'd been there a couple of years ago and enjoyed it but you never know whether you'd just been lucky with the acts that night. Well we weren't disappointed;...

Today we announced new CTPs (Community Technology Previews) of Expression Interactive Designer (Sparkle) and Expression Graphic Designer (Acrylic). I'm hoping the "other" one ( Expression Web Designer ) wont be too far away. Here's the blurb: Expression...

While I was searching around for the script debugging session from PDC (see the end of this post ) it struck me that it might not be well known that many of the PDC 05 sessions are available on the web. So in case you missed it, you can find them here...

First off, let me say that you have lots of different options when it comes to script debugging. Here I'm going to describe how to debug script running in IE using Visual Studio. And specifically, how you can use Visual Studio to help you debug the JavaScript...

In my earlier post about creating gadgets , I mentioned Visual Studio debugging and what to do if your gadget doesn't work. Let's start with the latter and then move on to the more general case of how to debug script in Visual Studio... What should...

I'm in a little bit of a rush to get to the MSN office in London as I'm attending a user group meeting there tonight; Ian Griffiths will be talking about C# 3.0 . I just wanted to post a couple of links I was shown last night by my girlfriend. They made...

I hadn't realised that MikeT has already blogged on our attempts to make it easier for people to find UK MSDN Nuggets they're interested in. Mike, I thought we were doing a worldwide synchronised launch like Visual Studio / SQL Server / BizTalk or Xbox...

Click here to find out about all upcoming events Here's a selection of a events in the pipeline for the next month or so. DevWeek is a great conference with a broad spectrum of speakers and tracks including .NET, Avalon / Indigo, ASP.NET, Architecture...

I can't believe I'm writing this in FrontPage but there you go (not because I don't like FP but it's an unlikely tool for authoring a blog entry). If anyone has a recommendation for good blog editing software please let me know. My simple requirements...

For those of you that missed the announcement (shame on you!), Microsoft announced Windows Live and Office Live back in November of last year: Designed to deliver rich and seamless experiences to individuals and small businesses, the new offerings...

[Firstly let me wish you all a Happy New Year and all the best for 2006. My blog has been very slow recently - I'd like to blame the arrival of my Xbox 360 but as it only turned up last week that's not going to work. I've been busy doing lots of "stuff...

Writing this on the flight to Los Angeles contemplating how I managed to be quite so disorganised. I've finished my book (the latest Rebus novel) and the Samurai Su Doku from The Times on Saturday (I will be submitting my entry in the hope of seeing my...

I've now updated the clickable links for Nugget #2. Rather than posting a new blog entry every time I add more links / resources for the (soon to be published) ASP.NET 2.0 Nugget Series , I've created an new article instead. That way you can always find...

I have a Windows Media Center PC the ownership of which has been a mixed experience. I love many of the features - the convenience of everything in one place, being able to record a TV series at the press of a button, pause TV while I make a cup of tea...

The first one was such a roaring success that Craig, Benjamin et al just couldn't wait to organise it all over again! DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper II will take place on 22nd October at the Microsoft Campus in Reading. Have a look at Mike Pelton's blog...

Pablissimo has posted a Sudoku app over on the spoke which he's called SharpDoku . It lets you transpose an existing Sudoku puzzle (say from The Times ) onto the game grid and you can then try and solve the puzzle as normal. Nice features are the "pencil...