Many thanks again to the Paul Yuknewicz and Todd Apley from the VB.NET product team who presented at the MSDN Days in Belfast and Dublin two weeks ago as part of their EMEA Tour. They've sent along their slide and demo material, which I've hosted for...

Next week, on the 3rd and 4th of May, four of our technical communities - the ICS , INDA , IrishDev , and NIMTUG - are joining forces to host their largest .NET developer conference ever at the Morrison Hotel in Dublin. If you're a developer, a project...

In each version of Visual Studio 2005, including the free Visual Web Developer Express Edition, ASP.NET 2.0 goes a long way to help you author websites that have a broad reach across web browsers and platforms. Many web developers exploring Visual...

[ Post-Event Update: Event followup links below.] Together with Darrell McCrone, I'm going to be presenting at Trinity College Dublin today on Visual Web Developer . We'll start from scratch, build a site, learn about the starter kits, and by the end...

The obvious news: The Express Editions of Visual Studio (5 million downloads and counting) are now officially free . The cool news: there's some very impressive content available in Starter Kits for Visual Studio Express Edition, as showcased in Dan...

I'm preparing an article with some tips and tricks for making sure that your sites built with the Club Site Starter Kit and Personal Web Site Starter Kits for Visual Web Developer are cross-browser and cross-platform compatible. In the process, I was...

What in the name of Munster could possibly, POSSIBLY cause the lovely Limerick to lose its esteemed City status, and be demoted to Town or even Hamlet in the eyes of the EU? Rugby, of course ! It's all fun and games until someone loses a city, lads...

Last week's MSDN Days in Belfast and Dublin featured an excellent presentation on ASP.NET Security by DevelopMentor's Dominick Baier . Dominick demonstrated how a hacker could exploit a simple and preventable vulnerability to exploit an ASP.NET site....

The missus knows how to cook. As we speak, she has just strained the Coq au Vin and is thickening her sauce of red wine and chicken juices. "I'm a perfectionist," she explains, "much like you when you're coding. I try; I aspire." She pauses to confirm...

Last Monday and Tuesday, using the March CTP, I demonstrated how quickly and easily developers can use Atlas to improve the client experience on their websites. Just before I got up to speak on Tuesday, I discovered that the Atlas team released their...

In my demos in Belfast and Dublin, I was running Windows XP on my laptop, but I decked XP out with a Theme that made it look a lot like a Media Centre PC. The theme is called Royale, and our friends at Microsoft New Zealand released it officially a...

I must confess, gentle reader, that while I've always insisted that the language-agnostic world of .NET welcomes all comers with open arms, in my heart of hearts I have sometimes been a closet C# snob. I come from the angly-bracketed realm of Java and...

...here they are! It was a fun event.

I took this photograph of the package of my favourite green tea ever (click to enlarge). It was a gift to my girlfriend's Dad, and it came from China. Today, I drank my last heartwarming mug, and those are my only leads in a quest to find some more...

I'm delighted to announce our March winners of the Microsoft Ireland Web Developer competition ! Congratulations to Donal O'Donoghue , who developed the Castlebar Golf Club website, and Brendan Wyse , who built the Allenwood Celtic site. Both Donal...

Once upon a time, I embraced those ubiquitous, head-wrecking puzzles called Sudoku s, and built a super-simple Sudoku Solver demo in ASP.NET 2.0 . In a recent article on MSDN, Stephen Toub has upped the ante significantly, by turning Sudoku into a...

Remember the Visual Studio 2005 Beta Experience program, which offered developers early access to Visual Studio and a steady stream of useful training resources? The Beta Experience returns, this time to offer you early access to Windows Vista and Microsoft...