Well it's probably old news for many people... http://www.microsoft.com/nz/presscentre/articles/2007/newleadership.mspx http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/CCD674FACCC2FD78CC25738B007910B2 http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=7483 http...

Well it's clear I celebrated too soon - I've lost at least 3 months of data, the entire (digital) life record of my daughter - gutted... While my HDD does appear to working as described in the last post , however, the data on the drive is old at least...

Wow - I've just had a few hours of terror as I cam home to hear my Maxtor Onetouch III 1TB external HDD clicking away and no longer in explorer... SCARY! A few quick searches on the web and looks like I'm toast - so ironic as we have had a few HDD failures...

A good laugh from Louis: http://blogs.reseller.co.nz/reseller/channelling/2007/08/you_may_very_well_be_at_a_geek.html Can't remember having my name badge on but it's very possible ;) It was a great event and we have updated TechEd Live ( www.techedlive...

This is already everywhere, but I thought worth repeating for readers of my blog. On the 24th the results of the United States vote for Open XML were made public. The INCITS Executive Board approved a “Yes with comments” position in a 12-3-1 (yes, no...

Another common question... Ecma Office Open XML was developed over the course of a year at Ecma International with input via Ecma’s Technical Committee 45 (TC45), which included information technology companies ( Apple , Intel , Novell , Microsoft , NextPage...

Over on Rod's blog the comments wage on and there is another common question popping up - 'no one can implement this standard other than Microsoft'. Luckily this is not true - we even have people in NZ who have used it to render documents and build solutions...

One of the first comments on Rod's blog related to IPR on Ecma Office Open XML . Here is a quick explanation of how we handle this.. There is a great deal of confusion on the IPR points in relation to the Ecma Office Open XML standard. We [Microsoft]...

There are a number of common questions in relation to this standardisation effort that I've heard many times - these are my short answers to each: Do other standardised document formats not exist today? Yes, in fact there are actually many different and...

There are a number of great reasons for this - but the first and most important point to make is that Ecma Office Open XML is already a standard today ratified by Ecma. The current discussion is whether it should be ratified as an international (ISO/IEC...

Standards New Zealand hosted the first day of feedback on Ecma Office Open XML in Wellington yesterday. Many of our customers and partners have not been able to attend this meeting which is a great shame as it’s important for the whole industry but time...

The event is going well and we are into day 2. TechEd Live ( www.techedlive.co.nz ) is the place to go to see what's happening... Blogs, photos and videos...

Well we are in full flow for TechEd - I spent the entire day on the event and visited the venue it's looking great. I also visited the .NET User Group AGM ( www.dot.net.nz ) and they had a great meeting but I should let them break any news from that....

I know I talk about these all the time but there really is (my point of view) no better way then to quickly digest some of the great new features there are 75 of these in total now and we just added a few more. The team review these regularly, we learn...

I recently went up to the US and was lucky enough to get an award. As a result at the awards dinner one person I got to catch for the first time this close was BillG: Cool...

This is a good list of links for developer virtual labs (which let you try the software in a remotely hosted virtual machine) we have these sort of labs hosted at TechEd and are regularly asked how to get access to them: ASP.NET 2.0 ASP.NET BizTalk Server...

I 've had a few days off over the last week (I've recently become a dad). During that time I have popped onto the PC a few times and caught up on some stuff. One thing I'd not invested enough time in was LINQ - I was at the PDC when we announced this...

It's been a while since there was a good sample comparing .NET v J2EE performance and cost. We recently released a new enterprise class sample ' StockTrader ' and have had some great feedback on this from the press: eWeek: "John Rymer, an analyst with...

Embedded in this post from Nigel is a streamed video really worth the 7 1/2 minutes to see how simple building a hosted Silverlight application is. Now note to Nigel - posting multiple autoplay videos on your blog is a little weird for the end user they...

No real supprise here but as of tonight TechEd NZ has effectively sold out we are leaving the site open for a few more days to let the last few individual registrations to go, so rush over there is you have not done so already. The TechEd US...

Over the last 6 months we worked with Mindscape (* link corrected) to build an end-to-end sample application. Darryl has blogged about this here and in his blog he tells you about the purpose of the site , where to get the code and how to visit it...

Mike Zeff has a good post I'd missed on Expression Training videos .

I was just having a look around the new MSDN site (msdn.microsoft.com). I like the search innovations they have made but I also really like the number of learning resource pages we have not the site to get people started. these are really valuable as...

From our audience management team.... Microsoft Expression has landed! The full family of Microsoft Expression products is now available for purchase in New Zealand. Expression Web. The professional design tool to create modern, standards-based sites...

This is pretty boring but shows how quick it is (took 1 minute) This is just a simple mash-up of some Live Spaces content against a standard viewing table rendered as a silverlight control. I might try a few other things wiith a little...