Sign up now for a free day of training on Azure this Friday 11th November: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032496082&Culture=en-GB Did I mention it's free? You even get a special free pass for an Azure subscription...

Scott Hanselman does a demo of the preview tab and solution explorer at DevReach 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=KVbsNgN4wJg&gl=GB Start watching around 27:21 if you want to jump quickly to the preview tab and solution...

We're running an event in conjunction with Scottish Developers this Friday. A Morning With Microsoft is a chance to learn more about Azure and how we design Visual Studio. Sign up at: http://devmorning-edinburgh-nl.eventbrite.com/

One of the new features of Visual Studio that Cameron Skinner demonstrated at Tech Ed recently was the provisional tab. This is a feature that I've been working on for a couple of years so I'm delighted to see it in the product. Some of you might remember...

Greg Wilson and Jorge Aranda have started a new blog which aims to be a bridge between researchers who study how software development happens and the practitioners who do software development. Sounds really interesting. http://www.neverworkintheory...

Kudos to Ryan Sackett at Precedent for setting up the Edinburgh UX book club . I went along to the first meetup last night and thoroughly enjoyed the discussion. We discussed the book ' Undercover User Experience Design '. It was a great discussion, and...

Well, not really, but...one of the things that I remember from a microprocessor technology course I took about twenty years ago while at Uni was the lecturer who said that one of the hardest things about writing C code that targets some little itty bitty...

Since I moved back to Edinburgh from Redmond a few years ago, I've been constanly amazed at the number of cool and exciting companies that are based here. I've had the pleasure of visiting a number of them and I've always been impressed by the skills...

I was out on a customer visit a few weeks ago, observing different developers at their workplace as they used Visual Studio to write code and build applications. One of the developers I observed behaved in ways that were common to both our opportunistic...

Just wanted to say a big thank you to the developers who came in to the Edinburgh office last week for a sneak peek at some of our ideas for the next version of Visual Studio. Each of you gave us incredibly insightful and useful feedback and it will be...

...for understanding who you are designing for. I've been involved in too many discussions about a design (either after a usability study or a review or during the design process) when we are discussing something that doesn't work or doesn't feel right...

I just read a great article by Alain Breillat describing the Apple design process: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/magazine/6/4/you_cant_innovate_like_apple There are a couple of things that stood out for me: A real design process...

I've observed this phenomenon quite a few times in different API usability studies and thought it would be worth discussing. It's not uncommon for an API to offer multiple ways of accomplishing the same task. For example, the following two lines of...

I have been struggling all day with trying to figure out how to refer to a templated control in a Windows Phone 7 app. The solution I ended up with was nothing like the solution I spent all day trying to figure out. I wanted to write this up for my own...

There's a great essay at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989304575503730101860838.html describing how great ideas often don't come from "momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of...

We're holding an event on Windows Azure on October 12th in the Edinburgh office. Full details and signup info is here .

Gergely did a great job last night demonstrating how to build applications for the Windows Phone 7 device. He has put his slides here . If you attended and have any comments you would like to share about the event, please drop me a note.

We're thinking of holding a Windows Phone 7 developer event in the Edinburgh office. Something like an introductory tutorial on developing apps for Windows Phone 7. At the moment we're trying to estimate the level of interest. Let me know if you would...

Nobody complains about how measuring cups work. But the OXO measuring cup was designed after careful observation had identified a problem that nobody had really ever noticed before. It's well worth watching this video for more details about the product...

I've created and worked with a number of different personas during my time in the Visual Studio User Experience team at Microsoft. I've learned a lot about how to use them effectively, and, contrary to what others have recently written about the use of...

Parallel programming is difficult. No surprises there really. I came across a great slide deck discussing some of the issues in detail. A portion of the deck does a great job of using the Cognitive Dimensions framework to analyse various language constructs...

Came across an interesting paper today: http://www.chrisluce.com/doc/icsm2009.pdf It describes a study in which 10 developers were asked to fix two bugs in a software system they had no experience with. The system consisted of 70 thousand lines of...

There are many descriptions of how developers work, think and act. For a long time, we've distinguished between opportunistic, pragmatic and systematic programmers (there is an old and short description of these here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive...

According to numerous studies ( Thomas Latoza has done many of them) developers spend most of their time either debugging code or determining the implications of a proposed change to code. While today's debuggers have allowed us to be more sophisticated...

I was reading this paper this morning: My Hairiest Bug War Stories It's a great read but since it was published in 1997, I wondered if things have changed? What are your hairiest bug war stories?