Many people think that Microsoft and OS movement have nothing in common. Well, they are wrong. Just take a look at Open Source at Microsoft web site . Brad Wilson provides more personal experience with Open Source at Microsoft in his interview . Recommended...

On April 21st, 2008... it was announced that 3rd refreshment to Windows XP in form of Service Pack was completed. Stay put for now, since it requires some time to post it to the web (Windows Update, etc.). But the work has been finished. I personally...

If, by any chance, you are interested how we do what we do here, in Developer Division, I recommend you to read an interview with Mark Osborne . It is more of a high-level overview of how developers' work is organized to meet multiple goals and avoid...

Long time no see. There were many reasons why I suspended blogging for some time. The most important one was that I was working on high-profile, confidential project of huge impact not only to Microsoft Customers but to humanity... just kidding :)...

The newest Customer Technology Preview (CTP) of the next version (code name Orcas ) of the Visual Studio is publicly available as of Monday, October 30! You can download it from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C09B5A2D-EB6A...

I was already blogging about Guidance Explorer here . Now seems to be the time to download the newest version (20060922) . It has autoupdate feature build in and some changes to structure of guidance tree. Valuable tool you should try!

At the beginning, there was pure HTML served by the mighty servers. The number of clients, or terminals was big but it was the server part to do most of the job. The client was merely displaying some textual data. Now it seems that there is not so...

The summer was suprisingly very busy time for me so I suspended blogging for some time. There is a lot of thoughts that I hope to share with you soon. For now lets remind of a few worthwile events in the software world: IronPython 1.0 - after a...

Not so long time ago on GotDotNet I came across patterns & practices Guidance Explorer which is a tool to serve .NET and ASP.NET application developer with guidance on patterns, security and performance. How to use it? Authors created this tool...

Yesterday, on June 8th, MSDN Wiki ( http://msdnwiki.microsoft.com ) become available to broad public audience. Concept of wiki is widely adopted in the Internet so I will skip brief intro to wikis . The purpose of MSDN Wiki site is to integrate community...

You have Visual Studio 2005. You are equipped with impressive hardware. Yet, you may be unable to write a large software system. Why? The key point is your perception of patterns that applies to big systems. Some say, they are applicable to each and every...

Not everybody knows that Visual Studio team has excellent tools to connect with Customers worldwide and hear to their voice. Our division is proud to host one of the first Customer feedback solutions of this scale in Microsoft. A system internally called...

An improved Beta of IronPython was recently released. There is a bunch of bugfixes, more and more C Python testcases are passing ( list of passing tests ) and this version was the first of Betas to be signed with a strong name. More details on changes...

IronPython team released sixth beta on the way to 1.0 release. You can download it from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F5BB7DEF-7C71-40D0-9AD7-81E60E85E3DB&displaylang=en Changelist in comparison to previous one (mostly...

I was blogging about it some time in November and it seemed to be an important scenario to our Customers. I am happy to inform that there is a tool to help with targetting the .NET Framework 1.1 with Visual Studio 2005! It is called MSBee and is available...

Do you like to use technology to have fun? Do you like to build cool and useful projects? Well then we have a contest that should be perfect for you! It begins with contestants submitting their cool ideas for projects built with Visual Studio Express...

I must admit that I am a big fan of Python as a programming language. It is easy to learn, looks nice and has very powerful tools at hand. It is hard to talk about them because there are so many of them, so better try it. It is easy! A little bit more...

Uninstall Tool for the latest WinFX CTP (Feb 2006) has been released. It allows you to uninstall all the WinFX Runtime Components 3.0 Beta 2 bits in the right order using one uninstallation application. There is no need to go to Add-Remove Programs and...

The Uninstall Tool for Visual Studio 2005 pre-RTM Feb 2006 edition was released yesterday. It has some bugs fixed and added removal of orphaned .NET Framework registry keys and uninstallation of WinFX Runtime Components 3.0 Beta 2 up to and including...

This release helps to uninstall all previous versions of WinFX Runtime Components 3.0 and Jan CTP release as well. Now you should not have any problems with any parts of WinFX installation left behind (it happens rarely but happens). Beware that because...

Przy konwersji projektów/solucji z formatu Visual Studio 2003 do formatu Visual Studio 2005 mogą wystąpić problemy z wyświetlaniem polskich znaków diakrytycznych. Jest to związane z odmiennym domyślnym kodowaniem plików źródłowych w Visual Studio 2005...

It seems that in cases when the solution/project was encoded using one of a codepages and not unicode (i.e. UTF-8) you may get improper characters on the screen after conversion (don't worry there is nothing wrong with the file itself, it is not corrupted...

A very frequent question from the users of Visual Studio 2005 is "what should I do to build .NET Framework 1.1 applications with VS2005?" For now there is no simple solution because it depends on the things the User wants to achieve. Of course you can...

Entire conversion for non-web projects works just fine but when you try to set up a web project and don’t have all the aliases and privileges set up it is kind of a pain. The workaround is to remove the Web Project from solution and add it again. Then...

Hi All! My name is Krzysztof Wilkosz. I am a Program Manager in Developer Division Setup. At the moment of writing these words I am responsible for the uninstall tools that allow you to make the step from Betas, CTPs to the final release of Visual...