As part of the devStream program my team has been running, we've been scheduling a monthly series of "arcDevBrainPicks" where you get to pick the brain of your local Microsoft Architect & Developer Evangelists. William Zentmayer and I hosted the first...

Just a reminder, tomorrow, Thursday, December 7th, is the first (of what I hope will be many) devCouncils that my team will be running in the Microsoft Iselin, NJ office. The devCouncil runs from 1pm to 5pm. If you haven't registered yet, you can find...

I want to thank everyone who came out to attend both the New Jersey and Central Penn.NET Code Camps that took place recently. The Central Penn.NET code camp took place in Harrisburg, Pa over this past weekend. The NJ one took place on Nov 18th. Thanks...

Tomorrow evening, I'll be speaking at the Princeton area Java User Group meeting about interoperability between .NET and Java . This should be a fun time, as I look forward to meeting some more folks in the Java community! I met Yakov Fain , the group...

Just a reminder, the Central Penn Code Camp is this Saturday, December 12th, in Harrisburg, Pa. The code camp will take place from 8am-5pm at the Harrisburg Area Community College. Click here to see the location on Live Local. Judy Calla has worked with...

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the launch events for the new Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals . Today officially kicks off the first one here in the northeast US. I'm out in Pittsburgh, Pa today listening in to Ken McArdle...

Speaking of user group birthday's… It was brought to my attention by Paul Mooney that next week, on December 7 th , the NJ Microsoft Developers group will celebrate its 6 th birthday. That makes the NJ MS Dev group the longest running .NET user group...

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Philly.NET "All-Stars" show in Malvern, Pa last week to celebrate the 5 th birthday of the group. What a fun night! Bill Wolff arranged for a panel of 8 most excellent speakers from the community to make for an interesting...

For the past couple of weeks that I've been a delinquent blogger, it sure seems that way! I've seen things that I never thought I'd see, as well as things that I haven't seen in a long time. First off, in the category of things I haven't seen in a long...

Registration for the upcoming NJ Code Camp III is now open! NJ Code Camp III is just about a week away on Saturday November 18, 2006. Scott Watermasyk has been compiling a great list of speakers and sessions via his blog. Scott should be posting the session...

The Database Professional edition of Visual Studio was announced back in June. It adds a set of key tools for database developers to the IDE that make developing stored procedures and other database elements much easier. Now, the official release of VS...

The Zend/PHP Conference & Expo is going on this week out in San Jose, California. Bill Hilf, from the Microsoft open-source labs, announced this morning at the keynote that Microsoft & Zend are working together to enhance PHP on Windows. That...

It's like digg, but for developers! I got a chance to meet the guys behind dzone.com at the AJAX Experience conference last week. It's a community driven site where the users control which content makes it popular on the front page. The items that make...

For those of you who live up in New England, we have new Developer Evangelist who is joining the team. Welcome Chris Bowen to Microsoft! Chris has been an active member of the New England developer community for some time now. He's now swallowed the blue...

Thank you NJ Transit! Thank you NJ Transit! Thank you NJ Transit! Can I say it again?! Thank YOU NJ Transit!!! You may be wondering why I am lavishing so much praise upon the transit agency that many Jersey residents have a love/hate relationship...

Today marks exactly one year since I've taken on the Developer Evangelist role at Microsoft here in New Jersey and New York. Since then, I've gotten to meet many wonderful folks in the area developer community via various user groups, code camps, and...

If you haven't heard by now, IE7 for Windows XP & 2003 was released on Thursday last week! Congrats to the new IE team for getting this release out. Now that IE7 is out the door, the IE team has announced a contest to create the best new add-ons for...

My colleague Doug Turnure down in Atlanta came up with this cool idea. Check out .NET University for a great way to learn about .NET 3.0 for free. .NET University is a way for anyone to get to a set of overview courseware for each of the 4 new technologies...

This week I'm attending the AJAX Experience conference up in Boston, Ma. There are couple of folks from the Internet Explorer and ASP.NET AJAX library teams here to participate. Microsoft has a booth where we are talking about both products with the attendees...

The NY PC Visual Basic SIG is meeting on Wednesday, November 8th in the Microsoft NYC office . Peter Ward, from WardyIT Solutions , will be doing a talk about SQL Server Automation and Server Management Objects (SMO) using Visual Basic .NET. For more...

Normally, registration is never required at a user group. However, due to the recent tightening of security at the building where the Microsoft office is located, the guards are now requiring a list of all visitor names so they can be signed in at arrival...

Via Scott Watermasyk ... Looks like Code Camp III for New Jersey will be taking place on Saturday November 18, 2006 in the Microsoft office in Iselin, NJ. Attendee registration will be opened up in the next couple of weeks. Keep an eye on NJCodeCamp.org...

If you spend a lot of time working with XPath, you probably know that it's not as easy as it could be in Visual Studio 2005. Back in July, our local resident XML-guru, Don Demsak (a.k.a. DonXml) released a really cool open-source plug-in to support XPath...

Via Dino ... If you model your data types in XSD, then maybe you have used xsd.exe, in the .NET Framework SDK. It can generate a .NET class from an XSD, and so can be really useful in the general domain of "XML Data binding" as they call it in the Java...

After listening to WOXY go off the air about three weeks ago, I figured it was the end of an era . But since then, various rumors had been floating around in the WOXY message boards about a resurection. Then, it was announced on the site last week that...