Here's a thoughtful piece by Directions on Microsoft suggesting what we have to get right this year . "Get Going on Tools" is right up there, but I don't mean to single it out, because I think the whole list is dead right. Is there anything you'd change...

Imagine this, if you will: NO PREMIERSHIP . FOR A YEAR. European society would collapse. I've just survived the Canadian equivalent. See the " Postal Strike " clip on this page for the Royal Canadian Air Farce's humorous take on the horror...

I touched down yesterday in Toronto, Canada, where I'm going to spend Christmas with my family in their home about two hours north of the city. The suburbs of Toronto are covered now with a beautiful, classically Canadian dusting of snow. Thanks to...

Ian Griffiths and Chris Sells, authors of the book Programming Windows Presentation Framework , have posted a great article up on MSDN. The article is called " Top Ten UI Development Breakthroughs In Windows Presentation Foundation ," but Chris says...

Cormac O'Brien pointed me to his brother's .NET Sudoku Solver that uses a rich Windows Forms interface to show you each step it takes to solve the puzzle! And Don Box has festively raised the stakes of what can be done using .NET and an X-Box 360 Controller...

I wrote a very brief response to Time Magazine's decision to select the Gateses and Bono as Persons of the Year, mentioning only that it sat very well with me. Before I do a lot of digging into the source material on Time’s site, I wanted to jot down...

Time Magazine has been naming its person of the year since 1927. This year, they've named the Gateses and Bono the 'Persons of 2005 .' The aim is to pick "the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied...

Don Box posted some code that lets you communicate with a wired XBox 360 Controller that's plugged into your PC using Managed DirectX . Too cool! I don't have an XBox360 (yet), but I own an XBox360 controller now ;) On the way into town last night...

If you're interested in IIS and web hosting, you won't want to miss the Shared Web Hosting Seminar in Dublin on Friday , which is being presented by the EMEA Microsoft Web Hosting Team. We've found that the audiences that are interested in this event...

Nick asked for it , and now you've got it: my Sudoku Solver that I cooked up with Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition, exposed as an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Service . The link goes to an explanation of how to consume the service. I also posted some sample...

Christmas sure is coming! On my nightly walk home, I ricochet like a pinball down Grafton Street, bouncing off frantic shoppers in the hub of Dublin's shopping arcade. Those of you who stop into a newsstand while doing your shopping may notice that...

Because it's never too late to plug a worthwhile event, I wanted to mention that Paul Fallon is going to be speaking tomorrow night at the Morgan Hotel in Temple Bar on surely his favourite topic, Indigo (a.k.a. the Windows Communication Framework). ...

At long last, I've posted the photos of some of the many participants who tried out the Mind Balance brain-computer interface at the Dublin launch event. I previously chronicled the story of the resurrection of Cerebus, our wireless brain-computer interface...

This is ludicrously cool: researchers at Stanford have developed a camera that lets you focus after you shoot . It's certainly a research idea at this point: from what I understand, the result is a relatively low-resolution image. But what a disruptive...

Great question today after the launch event in Cork! Part of my demo of the more granular security model of SQL Server 2005 involved showing how only one user had access to a symmetric key that was used to decrypt credit card information. I was...