Robert Burke's MSDN Weblog

In all this gallavanting around the country and installing beta software on long-suffering laptops, I somehow missed the fact that SQL Server 2005 Express Edition has had its first Service Pack released as a Community Tech Preview. There is a CTP release...

To my readers who are residents of Ireland or Northern Ireland: March, the first month of our ASP.NET Web Developer competition, is drawing to a close. If you've built an ASP.NET web site, perhaps using the free Visual Web Developer Express Edition...

I was one of the presenters at last night's IT@Cork Business Benefits of RSS event. Tom Raftery has posted photos and follow-up information already ! My goal was to outline the Microsoft RSS Platform, as presented last week at Mix06 by the Microsoft...

If you're in Dublin or Belfast, don't forget that the VB.NET Product Team are paying a visit on April 10th and 11th as part of their EMEA tour. Of course, the MSDN day will about much more than just the VB.NET language! The morning will feature...

Seen on a newsstand as I was leaving Las Vegas: Cover of Time: "Are Kids too Wired for their own good?" Cover of Wired: "Guest Editor Will Wright's new World of Games." I bought the Wired :) *Will Wright is the esteemed creator of The...

I'm a sucker for Microsoft Research talks; they're so cool. So I attended the MSR talk here at Mix06, hosted by Behrooz Chitsaz, Director at Microsoft Research. Microsoft spent $7Billon last year on R&D. Behrooz started by putting that in perspective...

Next Monday, I am going to be presenting in Cork on Microsoft's increasing integration of RSS into the platform. As part of my research, I had a great chat with one of the Microsoft RSS Team members yesterday in the hands-on lab area, and today I attended...

I'm supposed to be an evangelist, not a cheerleader, so it's safe to say I was devastated to hear that Vista has slipped . Like Robert Scoble, who is commenting here , I've only just heard the news myself here at Mix06, and the first thought that came...

News from the Game Developers Conference: C# on the Xbox 360 ! In a previous life, I had a very positive experience writing a graphics engine end-to-end in C#. All I can say to this announcement is: awesome . Here is the XNA page on MSDN . Here...

I just attended Robert Ingebretsen's excellent Mix06 presentation on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF/Avalon) for Designers. Robert worked closer to the metal than I would have expected for a talk oriented toward designers. I believe his goal was...

Check out Live Ideas and, if you're a developer, the developer resources for Live - http://msdn.microsoft.com/live Here's the March Community Tech Preview of Atlas , for building rich AJAX-enabled ASP.NET applications. There is a GO LIVE license for...

Summary notes (posted as taken) ( photos ) Changing experience as web evolves and "website" and "app" concepts merge - includes broadband - is cross-device - Media Centre PC or MCPC Extender ("10-foot experience") - mobile phone - often involves multimodal...

Welcome to Las Vegas, where Mix06 is about to kick off and Microsoft will announce just how big a bet it's making on technologies surrounding the next generation of the web. In true "Web 2.0 Style," I'm going to be blogging this in real-time as best...

For the first half of this week, I took part in Microsoft's Connect conference, which brought together .NET community leaders and "Evangelist"-types like me from all over Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Ireland and Northern Ireland were tremendously...

Congratulations to the winners of the inaugural Irish Blog Awards ! The event took place in Dublin's Alexander Hotel on Saturday night, and the blogs are abuzz with reports of the evening's success. I wish I could have been there myself -- alas...

Little Syncr , my little utility for synchronizing a photo collection between Windows and a Flickr account, now supports the updating of Flickr Tag, Photoset, and Visibility information from directly inside Little Syncr! I still prefer Digital Image...

Mix06 is happening next week -- and I'm going to be there!! :) Mix is being billed as a 72-hour conversation about various technologies that relate to the Web 2.0 : IE7 , WPF , Windows Live , mobile devices, Windows Media Center , Windows Vista , digital...

About a year ago I wrote up an explanation for how to change the Edit Mode for one of the fields in ASP.NET 2.0 GridView so that it would contain a DropDownList rather than a TextBox. That way, for something like a State or County column, you could limit...

My thanks to Michael Rys and all the attendees for their contributions to last night's excellent INDA Dublin event. And a very special thanks again to the INDA crew for making the event possible. Paschal, Philip and the INDA crew putting together a...

The Web Developer Competition, now well and truly launched, has caught the attention of bloggers including Darrell McCrone , Brian Delahunty , Damien Mulley , Kieran Lynam , and John Brennan ! It’s a sweet deal: build a website using the free Visual...

One last quick reminder that Michael Rys is in Ireland this week. He's Program Manager for SQL Server's Query Technologies (SQL and XQuery). He was Program Manager for many of the XML features in SQL 2000 and 2005 as well. Tonight, Wednesday the 8th...

When you register any of the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions , you get all kinds of free stuff: 250 royalty-free stock photography images Free Windows Icons Third-party components from Microsoft partners Free eBooks including "Build...

Damien Mulley , organizer of the Irish Blogging Awards , kindly offered me the opportunity to take part in the judging. But bear in mind that, in true blogging style, almost two thousand people have contributed electronically to the voting! The award...

I use Flickr to host my photos online. I use Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 Library to manage my photo collection locally. I want to be able to edit the titles, descriptions and tags of my online images, using a rich interface, even when I'm offline...

To my readers who are residents of Ireland or Northern Ireland: Are you developing ASP.NET web sites using the free Visual Web Developer Express Edition? Want to win an Xbox 360 ? Or maybe a high-spec laptop? Stay tuned for lots more on this......