Summary : Whether you're trying to get your Windows Store App certified in the Windows Store and running into blockers, or simply writing a new app for Windows 8 that you expect to publish via the Windows Store, check out the great insight provided by...

Christophe Nasarre-Soulier is a development-focused PFE I’ve worked via the Windows Store App Labs program. As part of that program, we provide design and development assistance to Windows Store App developers across the world, and gained a lot of exposure...

Storing data in XML format has presented a conundrum to SQL developers from time to time. While storing it is easy, how does one efficiently extract those pieces of data which are needed from the XML field? My friend and PFE colleague from Dubai, Batuhan...

This article has been contributed by Vasco Preto, a Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft Portugal. Vasco is no stranger to MSPFE, having previously contributed a very interesting case study on our TechNet blog. This time he shares a captivating walkthrough...

More often than not, when we investigate the managed heap using SOS we use the all powerful !DumpHeap command. It's an incredibly useful command to get in depth detail on what currently resides on the heap. Let's look at an example of the abbreviated output from !DumpHeap -stat: MT Count TotalSize...

Brad Linscott is a very experienced Premier Field Engineer from the .Net development side of the house (Ed: who originally trained me in .Net Debugging techniques, oh, eight? years ago?) and he’s published a video series on .Net Debugging on Channel 9...

Summary: Robert Evans , a Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer focused on development, informs us of some awesome resources for Windows 8 developers to get advice from experts and access to a myriad of Win8 devices. Take advantage of it if you can...

My good friend and colleague, Ambrose Wong , is a Principal PFE in Hong Kong. He has been debugging and troubleshooting production issues for over a decade now. More importantly, he mentors our customers to be their own hero and debug issues on their...

This article was contributed by Tony O’Grady , a Premier Field Engineer from the UK. Are you currently running old SQL Server 2000 instances in your estate? Are you planning to upgrade these to SQL Server 2012? A direct upgrade...

This blog post has been authored by Yawei Wang , a Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft Singapore. He describes a very common and important type of issue – heap corruption – and how you can successfully debug it using the Debugging Tools for Windows...

Damana thinks so (or so her title implies!) in her post Team Players Are Worth More Than Superstars Often when we hire developers, we look for technical skills and client facing skills and design skills. This is all well and good as long as we also look...

Grant’s not on holiday (ho ho! Snap!), as we can tell because he’s posted a couple of updates about updates! First, Visual Studio : The Visual Studio Updates are a new mechanism that the team is using to provide ongoing value through the year to Visual...

In the first part of this series, Batuhan Yildiz , a Premier Field Engineer from Microsoft Dubai, explained you how to install and get started with Distributed Replay. He continues in this series by showing you how to actually capture and replay workloads...

This article has been contributed by Batuhan Yildiz , a Premier Field Engineer from Microsoft Dubai. This is the first part of a two part series where he explains how to use the new Distributed Replay functionality in SQL Server 2012. The first part covers...

It's not news that data security should always be top-of-mind for DBAs. So, for those of you using SQL Server 2008 or 2008 R2, are there information security risks if you're database files (data and log files) get stolen? What happens if someone makes...

Article by Tamer Maher , Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Have you ever been in a situation where custom solutions for Microsoft SharePoint are not performing well? And you have spent countless nights with your team of developers, working...

Vijayshinva Karnure , a Premier Field Engineer from India, writes about using Windows 8 as his primary work machine. Vijay works on Developer technologies, and like him, many developers use server OS installations on their desktop or laptop to ease testing...

Damana (Geek Diva) , a developer PFE from Australia, explores how you choose what your next development project target will be: There are two spaces in the dev world for a dev to touch on right now that can not be ignored. If you do ignore them, you are...

Article by Tamer Maher , Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. As part of the excitement around the release of Microsoft SharePoint 2013, I was in Redmond last week to attend the SharePoint 2013 Ignite Developer training. While there, I was lucky enough...

Nelson’s been spelunking around the memory structures of WCF 4.5’s support for WebSockets and the ASP.Net Web API: I attached windbg to the server process (in this case, w3wp.exe) and loaded sos. If you’re curious about how either set of object structures...

Continuing their series on new features in Visual Studio 2012, Brad over at the PFE Developer Notes for the Field blog gets into Exploratory Testing : One of the new features is Exploratory Testing, which allows you to test your software without a pre...

Brad at the PFE Developer Notes for the Field blog shares news of Caller Information , a new feature in Visual Studio 2012: One of the new features is the concept of Caller Information, available in both C# and VB.  Caller Information allows you...

Grant Holliday is a PFE from Canberra who recently worked with the TFS product group in Redmond. And, like, wrote books on the subject and stuff. Recently I was invited to speak at TechEd 2012 Australia on my experience with building an Internet-scale...

My colleague Damana is running Windows 8 Application Excellence labs too, and she’s compiled a list of tips for developers looking to sail through our pre-certification scrub: Preparing for Win8 App Excellence Labs . You will hear people say that the...

Have you ever walked into your office in the morning, and wondered if you were forgetting something important... a task, or a project, perhaps? Well fret no more, my friend! SharePoint to the rescue, with a fantastic new feature and service application...