Ronan Geraghty's Blog

MSDN is one of the sites I use most frequently, so I thought it would be a good candidate for my first IE 8 Accelerator. And it turns out it's even easier to do than writing a webslice. All you need to do is write a simple XML file, the specification...

So having just installed IE8 beta 2 today I thought I'd have a go at creating a Webslice for my blog...Turns out it's pretty easy, and I was even able to put a version of the Popfly mashup from my last post in my preview (added my blog's logo to make...

Just dropped Adam Nathan's recent news Popfly gadget onto my blog, and it's extremely easy to use it for any blog that has an RSS feed...Just open his original project at http://www.popfly.com/users/Adam/Recent%20Posts and Tweak it to point it to your...

Then why not join Mark Russinovich and a panel of industry experts for a LIVE virtual roundtable to explore your top of mind performance issues, common misconfigurations, and tips on how to fix them. From boot times and applets to disk performance and...

Great feature, new in beta 2 :-) Performance of the javascript engine has been a major focus for IE 8, and it also gives you the tools to ensure that the javascript on your site is optimised. By using the profiler you can figure out where you're spending...

IE 8 beta 2 launched today in English, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese. 21 languages in mid-September, download it from http://www.microsoft.com/ie8 . To get a feel for the new IE8 experience, check out the videos here - to get you started...

I just spent a couple of weeks in Switzerland and one of the highlights was a (two-stage) cable car ride up to Les Diablerets at an altitude of 3000m. The below Deep Zoom collection consists of a partial panorama plus detail of the halfway cable car station...

Between TechReady in Seattle (an internal technical conference, think of it as Tech Ed for Microsoft folks) followed by holidays I've been out of the office for the last month, during which there has been many interesting happenings, including SQL Server...

Yesterday Ryanair.com went live with a new destinations map which uses Silverlight to map all its destinations and routes. (For those of you who may not have heard of Ryanair, they are Europe's largest low fares carrier, with more than 700 routes across...

I've been doing some work with Silverlight over the last couple of weeks and ran into this question yesterday (specifically re. SL 1.0). The issue arose since Firefox 3 came out after Silverlight 1.0 and is related to silverlight detection, meaning that...

Patterns & Practices have just released guidance to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications. This guidance will help you design and build flexible composite WPF client applications—composite...

If you're doing ASP.NET development then you need to check these tools out. As per this security bulletin there has been a recent rise in SQL injection attacks, exploiting vulnerabilities in sites that do not follow best practice. So here's what you need...

Hot off the press from TechEd US, Silverlight Beta 2 will be available this week. Check out below for a summary of some features, but perhaps most interesting is that Silverlight 2 Beta 2 comes with a commercial go-live license ! · UI Framework : Beta...

This is a great site for developers who want to get up to speed with developing for Sharepoint. You can download a ready-to-go VPC or just take some Virtual Labs to take hands-on exercises via your browser. Here's a snapshot of the available topics: There...

I recently blogged about SLPS and am delighted to highlight a case study featuring a local ISV - Softedge Systems . Softedge Systems flagship product, DocsAlive 2007, is a multimedia content-creation tool built on the 2007 Microsoft® Office system. DocsAlive...

It has been brought to our attention that some Partners have recently experienced difficulties in accessing their MSDN Downloads. This was due to a system change - affected users will need to re-associate their Live ID to their subscription to re-access...

The PDC 2008 site is live as of today - PDC will provide an indepth understanding of Microsoft’s future platform and offer practical guidance to help plan the evolution of your own products. To get a flavour of what to expect, check out the preliminary...

Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges (such as logging, validation, caching, exception handling, and many others). Application...

If you need to learn about Architecture, Deployment and Operations essentials of Dynamics CRM then I think you'll find this white paper very useful. It gives a good overview of the platform capabilities and the opportunities for ISVs to plug-in to the...

Popfly Game Creator is now in Alpha ... all you need to do is log in and you can start creating games either from scratch or else based on a template, without needing to write any code. Since the game is a Silverlight app it will run in your web browser...

Want to protect your .NET code from reverse engineering? Obfuscation is better than nothing, but it doesn't go far enough. Encryption ? Well the encrypted MSIL has to be decrypted before the CLR can handle it, meaning there's an opportunity for...

Check out Windows Live Maps where you can now zoom in to Birds' eye views of · Dublin · Carlow · Cork · Galway · Limerick · Navan · Wexford The level of detail is very impressive For example, here's Microsoft Building 3 (Atrium B) (be sure to select Bird...

If you watch any of the flavours of CSI you'll probably get a kick out of this article which describes how the show's forensic scientists attempt to recreate a crime scene using hundreds of photos taken from a camera phone. The technology used to stitch...

Microsoft Western Europe are running some free training in May and June on developing with the UC platform. Location: Microsoft Innovation Center Barneveld Nijverheidsplein 21a 3771 MR Barneveld The Netherlands Date: May 8 th -9 th , 2008 Location: Microsoft...

One of the reasons I applied for this job was to broaden my horizons a bit...Well be careful what you wish for ;-) Within the last 5 working days, I've had meetings / workshops / conversations / played-with the following: VB 6 -> .NET migration...