Amazingly, there's already a drop of the LINQ PDC Preview that works with the RTM version of Visual Studio 2005. You can get it here, on the LINQ home page . LINQ, the Language INtegrated Query Project, is still a future technology of course, but for...

For those of you who installed any pre-RTM versions of Visual Studio 2005, including Beta 2, I highly recommend running the Automatic Uninstall Tool. Before Installing Visual Studio 2005 It’s recommended that you install Visual Studio 2005 on a...

Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 have been Released To Manufacturing! They're available to download now for MSDN Subscribers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/ Redistributable packages, such as the final .NET Framework 2.0 , are also...

"Do you think we can get it working again?" I asked Scott, as he opened up the Marsellus Wallace briefcase to reveal the bits of a disassembled brain-computer interface. Here we were on a Saturday morning, in Gary's stunning office space overlooking...

Visual Studio's Team System for Architects piece is great stuff. As the first deliverable of Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative, it lets architects visualize and validate their distributed architectures. At its core are 3 types of diagrams: ...

So you're hoping to explore the pre-release WinFX goodies - WPF, WCF and WWF - from the comfort of home. Do you need the PDC DVDs ? Do you need an MSDN subscription ? Do the stars have to be aligned ? No , no , and... well, no... although astral...

In this week's MSDN Flash Ireland editorial, I reflected on Steve Ballmer's visit to Dublin and looked toward our next focus: the November launch events. I've been eagerly awaiting the official photos from the SteveB visit. Here are a few half-decent...

Thanks to Paschal for the blog entry about our WinFX hands-on labs that we are running this week and are open to the public. We're running them again today in Sandyford, just south of Dublin (take the LUAS green line down here; here are directions )....

Local Regional Director Nick Grattan, who just so happens to be a SQL Server 2005 guru, has recently been posting a series of thoughtful and well-written gems deep-diving into SQL Server 2005, like this on PIVOT , this on the OUTPUT clause , this on UDFs...

Today, a small group of us learned heaps walking through the WCF hands-on labs from PDC05. In the course of walking through the WCF exercises, we stumbled across an encrypted connection string in a Web.Config file. Encrypting that string seemed like...

My Cork and Galway SQL Server 2005 presentations featured thoughtful questions on Web Service Endpoint integration that I wasn't able to answer completely (and occasionally at all!). That prompted a thorough, if belated, literature search, which I'll...

I've been working this week with our incredibly dedicated lab staff (especially one Antonio Palacios) to make next week's Dublin-based WinFX Hands-On Labs unmissable. The Avalon (WPF) team, among others, have given us the go-ahead to present through...

...which begs the age-old question: Master Chief's minions versus the Riders of Rohan; who would win? Peter Jackson on Halo, which will be shot in Wellington, New Zealand: "I'm a huge fan of the game and look forward to helping it come alive on the...

For those of you from the Cork City area, come on out to the IMPERIAL Hotel tonight at 7:00 for a look at what's new in SQL Server 2005 for developers. This SQL presentation is the sequal to the presentation I gave in Waterford last week. It's a developer...