Suppose you've been working locally with a SQL Server 2005 database that contains the data for a website, and it's time to move your database and data up to the web hoster. Maybe you've got a few tables, some stored procedures, and even a little data...

Oh baby, there goes my evening . Daniel Lehenbauer has updated his community-driven 3D Toolkit for the Windows Presentation Foundation to WPF Beta 2. WPF, of course, is part of WinFX, which reached Beta 2 last week. ( Details & install info here...

Have you heard of the Windows Media Photo specification? Neither had I, until today! Windows Media Photo is an image file format that is optimized for digital photography. To quote the whitepaper , Windows Media Photo: "... employs a new, state...

Windows Live Local (Virtual Earth) has released a new Beta version of their online mapping application , which now includes features like live traffic information, new maps of the UK, and some really impressive new developer support ! Fellow...

The only thing funnier than Something Awful's take on Web 2.0 is O'Reilly's take on the upcoming IT @ Cork MiniConference on Web 2.0 . Common sense surrenders. [Update: Gotta respect them for responding .]

Experts from all over the globe are gathering in Cork on June the 8th for a Web 2.0 half-day Conference, hosted by IT @ Cork. I'm really excited to be involved in this one. Speakers include Shel Israel , Salim Ismail , Fergus Burns , Walter Higgins...

If you've been waiting (with beta'd breath) for the ideal moment to start exploring the upcoming Microsoft developer technologies, that moment has arrived. Yesterday saw the release of three different Beta 2s: WinFX Beta 2, Vista Beta 2, and Office 2007...

[Updated 29 May] Microsoft Ireland's European Development Center (EDC) continues to grow. Over 100 new research and development positions will be filled in the next 18 months. A colleague of mine from EDC's Windows Live experience team, Declan Fitzgerald...

The Visual Studio Tools for the Office System , or roughly VSTO for short, allow you to use Visual Studio and any of the .NET languages to write line-of-business applications that integrate with the Office suite of applications. Three local experts...

I've recently met a number of web developers who are working with ASP.NET 1.1 and are keen to transition to Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0. But lingering questions remain about migration, and what to do with existing ASP.NET 1.1 assets. Peter Laudati...

Paul Hand sent me along the Powerpoint slides from his BizTalk presentation at the Irish National Developers Conference earlier this month. The poor soul was given an interesting technology to talk about... and the same timeslot as our visitor, Scott...

While scanning through the papers this weekend (over some Taiwanese High Mountain green tea that was relayed to me by the thoughtful and multilingual Eric Fish ), I discovered that robots had invaded the National College of Ireland on Friday ! NCI had...

[Another in my continuing series on the innovative Microsoft Research projects I had a chance to check out in Cambridge...] I had the good fortune of meeting Don Syme at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, who introduced me to his brainchild, F# (which...

The videos and slides from the Mix06 conference, which was held in Vegas last March, are now online at http://sessions.mix06.com/ . Now I can go back and soak up all the sessions I wasn't able to attend while I was there! For those of you who saw...

I presented about the Windows Presentation Foundation at yesterday's INDC usergroup event in Dublin. First of all, congratulations to the many communities of Ireland and Northern Ireland who joined forces to host their most ambitious developer conference...

I had the good fortune of spending Thursday and Friday last week at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. I had been invited to visit by Ralf Herbrich and Thore Graepel, the leaders of MSRC's newly-formed Applied Games Group . Before starting the Applied...