Ronan Geraghty's Blog

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...

Apart from CI support which I wrote about in a previous post there's a whole bunch of new features in TFS which are noteworthy, such as SQL named-instance support (so multiple TFS instances can share a SQL server), simplified installation, support for...

Check out http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2008/overviewdemo/ for a new video that provides a high level overview of what's in SQL Server 2008. Quite an easy way to learn about the platform for the next generation of data-driven applications!

I first started using Continuous Integration (CI) in 2002 when my then company started eXtreme Programming – I found it great and subsequently introduced it at every opportunity using combinations of CruiseControl / scheduled tasks and so on. When...

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...

This is a simple example of how to ensure that an (animated) ad created with Silverlight (in this case an ad for my blog :-)) can remain always visible regardless of whether your user scrolls down or not - in this case I anchored the ad to the top left...

Microsoft today announced that coinciding with the final release of Visual Studio 2008 we will release much of the source code to the .NET Framework Libraries under the Microsoft Reference License ( http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/licensingbasics...

So Santa brought me an 80GB Zune . Clare says that putting the videos from the Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit on it makes me a geek. Maybe she's right :-o, but I think it's pretty cool and there's a Zune folder in the training kit if you look closely...

Preview the first chapter from any of these Microsoft Press Visual Studio 2008 titles here , and then download the entire contents of Introducing Microsoft LINQ, as well as additional chapters from the other two titles. Introducing Microsoft LINQ by Paolo...

Over the next few weeks Dave Northey, Bob Duffy and I will all be travelling to Belfast, Cork, Galway and Dublin to talk to the community about the new features in above products. Exact dates and links to register can be found below - come along to see...

My f irst post on this blog! Hope that cross posting to http://blogs.msdn.com/ireland works :-) Take a look at the Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Guide which is now available for download. If you're already using or just looking...

I'm doing a lot of demos at the moment and most of the time I'm using VPCs since I can tee things up beforehand, do my demo and discard any changes at the end. Another advantage of this situation is that I can try out combinations of betas / CTPs quickly...

So you may know that AutoCAD 2009 uses WPF for it's "chrome" (no not that Chrome, the other chrome i.e. ribbon, action recorder and QuickView). What's probably less well known (but which you can learn about at the MIX 08 University in this session ) is...

I figure the most logical follow-on from my last post is to show how simple it is to start using WPF within an existing Windows Forms application. I set myself the goal for this post of doing this with zero code behind whatsover to avoid clouding the...

Last night we launched Microsoft BizSpark in The Four Seasons Hotel in Ballsbridge, Dublin. This is a global program to help early-stage startups when they need it most, by giving Software No upfront cost for developer tools and production...

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...

I previously blogged about the BizSpark program which we launched here on 6th Nov 2008. The ISA is running an event on Monday 19th January 2009 to cover the BizSpark program and its benefits for startups. The details are: Start Time: 18:00 Venue: IBEC...

VSTO 3.0 with Visual Studio 2008 makes it incredibly easy to extend the office ribbon, and write managed code to add new functionality. A good proof of this from my recent experience was a simple add-in I wrote which combined Information Rights Management...

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...

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...

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...

Ok, in no particular order, here are 5 features in VS 2008 which are going to save me some time: Extender Wizard This is convenient for use with the AJAX Control Toolkit: to add an extender to a given control, just click the to show the popup...

There's a ton of great new features in VS 2008, for Web development, OBAs, data access, devices and so on, all of which will help to make developers more productive - I've blogged about some of them already and will do more in the future, but today when...

Its all about Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Quite an old video :-), but the gist is about right - this release is all about improving developer productivity, so even if you don't want to target the .NET framework 3.5 you can still take...

Are you clear on when to use say WPF instead of Winforms? Or, just as importantly, when to use Winforms (e.g. for a more traditional LOB application)? Or that you can easily use both together? How does Silverlight compare to XBAPs? David Chappell has...