January, 2007

Earlier this month at the Northern NJ User Group (N3UG), Randy Hayes delivered an excellent talk on Developing and Running as a Non-Administrator . You may think that running as a non-administrator won't be pleasant, but it's for you and your application...

Starting next week, if you're running Vista on your laptop, you can get free wi-fi access at any T-Mobile hotspot in North America until April 30th . Personally, I'm a Dunkin' Donuts guy, but that's a nice deal for folks who frequent Starbucks and other...

Via Leon Brown ... Back in December, Microsoft announced the first CTP of "WPF/E", a great new solution from Microsoft for delivering rich, cross-platform, interactive experiences including animation, graphics, audio, and video for the Web and beyond...

At the devCouncils in NY & NJ earlier this month, I said that I anticipated the final release of ASP.NET AJAX "any day now". Well... Hot off the presses! The official 1.0 release of ASP.NET AJAX, including the cross-platform & cross-browser client...

Via Tom Hollander ... The second CTP of Enterprise Library 3.0 is now available to download on our CodePlex community site ! Full details on this release are in the included release notes, but here are a few highlights: Validation Application...

Thanks to everyone who attended the devCouncil events in NJ & NY this month. This was the third 'set' of devCouncil meetings to take place, since we kicked the program off. This month focused on web development, specifically ASP.NET and the new Microsoft...

Ever wanted to know how to do something specific in ASP.NET? My colleague Asli Bilgin from the Microsoft Industry Services team has put together an amazing collection of ASP.NET resources, chuck-filled of How To links that are just great to have around...

Wow! What a day yesterday. Yesterday was the launch event for Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System. This was my first time participating in one of these large launch events since I joined the Evangelism team at Microsoft last year. It was...

This Thursday, January 18th, is the January devCouncil in NYC from 1-5pm. Immediately following the devCouncil is the monthly meeting of the NYC .NET Developers Group from 6-8pm. This month's devCouncil topic is web development. We'll spend the first...

Milan Negovan has compiled a series of 'cheat sheets' for the Microsoft AJAX Library . These make a handy dandy reference. Sounds like he's working on additional ones, so I'll have to check back.

This is the week of the year the geeks go nuts salivating over all of the gadgets and other things showed off at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas and MacWorld in San Francisco. I'm sure most folks either saw or heard about Apple's iPhone announcement...

Please join William Zentmayer and myself this Friday morning at 10am EST for our monthly 'arcDevBrainPick'. This is your chance to pick the brain of your local architect and developer evangelists. The arcDevBrainPick is an open forum online, similar to...

Check out this video of what Yahoo is doing with the Windows Presentation Foundation. They've rebuilt their instant messenger to use the new presentation foundation in Vista. It's an example of the type of next-gen application user experience that is...

Registration has opened for the Mix 07 conference in Las Vegas. April 30 — May 2nd, The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas On the frontiers of the Web, boundaries are blurring—developers and designers, advertisers and publishers, software and services, media...

Back in October, I wrote about how excited I was to learn that the new Remote Desktop (RDP) client that comes with Windows Vista supports ClearType. With the hack I wrote about, I was able to run the Vista RDP client on my home XP machine to use my work...

Okay okay... perhaps that's a slight exageration. The sign in front of a Point Pleasant Beach bank only read 74. But that's certainly close enough. (Actually, I saw that Cherry Hill, NJ officially reached 75 on TV.) With the great weather, I spent the...

philly.net cordially invites you to our first ever Philly.Net.Pub night! It'll be at the Great American Pub Bar & Grill in Conshohocken, Pa. Consider this a .Net meeting, but instead of topics and speakers, they'll just be geeks and beer (okay, some...

Looks like attendees of the upcoming Windows Vista & Office 2007 Key City Launch events will receive a free copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Professional & Microsoft Office Groove 2007. Registration is filling up fast. Go here for links to the launch...

Omar Al Zabir , from Pageflakes.com , has built a cool prototype using ASP.NET AJAX that implements an 'ajaxified' start page portal site. Cool: Built on ASP.NET AJAX + .NET 3.0 + DLinQ in 7 days! Not as cool... it mimics Google. :) Although, he also...

It seems .NET user groups have been popping up all over the place. We've now got a total of 5 in New Jersey now. Well, now one has finally formed on Long Island. Dan Galvez and the folks at Ruby Digital in Hauppauge, NY have set up a group at their office...

From the "I learned something new" file today, a very good post today by Dare Obasanjo discussing some key aspects of JSON vs. XML when it comes to AJAX-style applications. It seems JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) has been becoming the data format of...

Go get it here . Hopefully I'm not the first one to point this out to you. But better late than never. This service pack addresses issues that have come up with Visual Studio 2005 since it was first released just over a year ago. You can read more about...

Chip Lemmon is looking to form a new user group in New Jersey for designers and developers focused on building user interfaces. There's been a lot of focus in the tech industry lately on rich user experiences. Users are demanding better from developers...

Tomorrow, Thursday January 4th, is the January devCouncil in NJ. This month's topic is web development. We'll spend the first half discussing the new features in ASP.NET 2.0, then we'll cover the new Microsoft AJAX Library and how you can use it with...

In December, Microsoft hosted a series of launch events around the north east US for the new Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals. Thanks to everyone who attended. The presentation slides from the launch sessions can now be found here...