Robert Burke's MSDN Weblog

I didn't see any presenters at TechEd Europe wield NLarge today, although some of them certainly could have used my WPF-based screen magnifier. I tend to lurk near the back of the Tech Ed presentations, since I sometimes need to duck out on official...

It was alluded to, almost as an aside, during this morning's keynote speech at Tech Ed Europe. But let's not let today's most impressive bit of Microsoft developer news pass us by: The .NET Framework 3.0, formerly known as WinFX, has been released...

They've just released ASP.NET Ajax (formerly ASP.NET "Atlas") in Beta 2 over on the ASP.NET site. (In fact, atlas.asp.net now redirects to ajax.asp.net .) They've changed the control namespaces from atlas: to asp: , so I need to do a bit of search...

I'm hanging out at the Visual Studio booth in the Ask the Expert area at Tech Ed Europe: Developers. I took a swing around the Ask the Experts area to see what's going on, and to meet some of the folks from the product teams. I met two guys from the...

If you've got a hunger on you for a preview of the next generation of the Visual Studio development envrionment, you can download the Community Tech Preview of Visual Studio code name "Orcas" , which is the flavor of the course that will follow Visual...

It's time to get this blog back in motion, live from the TechEd Europe: Developers conference in Barcelona. I'm here for the week and will be hanging around the Ask the Experts section on the Exhibition floor, so if you're here, pop by and say hello...

NLarge is a free little utility for technical presentations. It magnifies the screen (via a smooth animation), and allows you to pan and zoom around the magnified image. You can annotate the magnified screen using the mouse or a Tablet PC pen. NLarge...

Firefox 2 was released yesterday and it turns out the Internet Explorer team sent them a cake . Reports are it was a tasty chocolate rum cake :) As I said yesterday , between IE7, Firefox 2, and an arsenal of add-ins, the web's a better place these...

The Internet Explorer 7 Team posted an amazing list of must-have Add-Ins for IE7 . Some I'd seen, some were new, and I'm using almost all of them now. If you're not surfing the web with IE7 yet, you can get it here , or Automatic Updates will push...

What does Windows Live have to offer Developers? Have you ever wanted to... ... add Virtual Earth to a website? ... use the Live platform to build Messenger activities ? ... build Search on your site? ... write your own Gadgets ? .....

There's a fresh wealth of design ideas in this month's Where Design Comes From newsletter . My favorite piece is Jonathan Yuen's design portfolio , which he's delicately sketched with ink and innovation. Interacting is a joy and gives a...

I've written before about how to ease the challenge of scripting your data to move it from a local SQL Server 2005 .mdf database to a hoster. Things got a little easier today with the SQL Server Hosting Toolkit , which, in its first incarnation, is...

Last Wednesday I gave a presentation to SkyNet , the University of Limerick Computer Society. About 30 undergrad and graduate students turned up for Atlas, Vista and pizza, in that order. What I showed them was basically a riff on my ASP.NET "Atlas...

Windows Vista RC2 (build 5744) was available internally late last week, and I'm writing to you from it right now. It's available for download to technical beta testers, Customer Preview Program participants, TAP Testers, and MSDN/TechNet subscribers....

Launch is coming soon, not just for Windows Vista and .NET 3.0, but also the 2007 Office System and Exchange 2007. We're looking for a few great Partners to be involved in this very significant event. Over the past two weeks, I've met with local development...

I was asked today how to add a hyperlink to an image in an ASP.NET 2.0 GridView column, so that clicking the image will cause the browser to navigate to a different page. I thought I'd post it in my blog, just in case anyone else is searching for this...

In Windows Vista, the Event Viewer user interface now allows you to quickly attach tasks to system events - in fact, Application, Security, System, Setup and Forwarded events. For instance, in the image below, I am attaching a task to the System event...

Vista's Reliability and Performance Monitor provides you with insight into how well your system is performing. In previous versions of Windows client (and server), your system collected a variety of information about events related to system reliability...

The Galway ICT Productivity Conference, which will take place on Thursday October the 12th, promises top-class speakers for Developers, Architects and IT Professionals . The theme of the day is ‘Increasing Productivity through Technology,' which is looked...

In the spirit of last week's list of ways to get free developer support from Microsoft , I just wanted to let you know about one other way in which Microsoft employees can provide free support. It should come as no surprise that Microsofties often...

I've been meaning to write for some time about Charles Petzold 's book on the Windows Presentation Foundation, Applications = Code + Markup . Early reviews of the book offered glowing praise , so I ordered a copy of my own. I've read enough of it by...

The Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta has just been released. Here's the official announcement . You can register for and download the Service Pack updates at http://connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio . (The Connect site is a bit finnicky. If you...

Clare asked Dave and me to reveal some hidden gems that are available from Microsoft for technical support and learning. This was our list of the shiniest gems that we find devs and IT pros don't always know about. I also posted the Best of the Rest...

Tim Sneath is on a roll with his series of Windows Vista Secrets posts, and rumour has it he has something like 100 of these in the pipe. A hundred or not, he has me at four. :) 1. " Open Command Prompt Here ." No Power Toy intervention necessary...

One of the image processing technologies that Andrew Blake (of Microsoft Research) showed us during his Computer Science and Illusion presentation was image quilting , where bits of a texture are stitched together into a large, cohesive image. A cool...