(groan) I'm away this week in the south of France attending an internal briefing on Yukon / CLR integration prior to the PDC. Whilst the tools themselves have still got a little way to go before they're mature enough for production use, I've picked...

Just noticed that Microsoft Press have recently published a new book by Simon Guest on interoperability between .NET and J2EE . I've not seen it yet, but a book like this is desperately needed. I'm regularly asked about this and even if the question...

Arrr! Shiver me timbers! Today is Talk Like a Pirate day.

Some time ago I wrote a tool called Snippet Manager which manages all those little bits of code that I find myself needing repeatedly, such as the Dispose pattern. (Of course, you can drag snippets to the toolbox in VS.NET, but I wanted something...

I've been keeping a blog for about two months now, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to do some analysis of the logs. The blogging application that this site uses ( BlogX ) records the daily hits each blog gets into a tab-delimited...

For what it's worth, I've updated my dream .NET bookshelf . Have I missed anything?

I gave a session on Yukon at the VBUG conference yesterday - they're some of the friendliest developers I know, and it's always a pleasure to work with them. User groups like this go a long way towards building community; at the drinks reception, I...

The final release code for Office 2003 (officially named Microsoft Office System 2003 Professional Enterprise Edition :-) has finally been made available to MSDN Subscribers. Click here  to download - expect the site to be sluggish for a...

John Rutter's Requiem is perhaps one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard. If you think contemporary classical music is limited to 12-note scales and prepared pianos, try this CD for an experience that will leave you wanting...

I liked this item on Slashdot . The United States (like the UK ) has a "do not call list". But the telemarketing firms don't like the idea, and have called these lists "unconstitutional". So the Miami humour columnist Dave Barry encouraged his...

There are times when I take the .NET Framework base class libraries for granted. But it saves so much time on a daily basis. Today I needed to update a file timestamp and realised that I didn't have a touch utility on my machine. the FileInfo class...

Gianpaolo Carraro (one of my counterparts in Microsoft EMEA) pointed me to this presentation on the current status of Mono , delivered recently by Miguel de Icaza. It's impressive to see how rapidly Mono is maturing as a project. With a fairly...

Time to update your machines again... :-(

When you're debugging code with Visual Studio .NET, it's really hard to see what data is currently contained within a DataSet. Sure, the Locals window will show any DataSet objects currently in scope, but finding out what data is contained within them...

I regularly find myself opening Visual Studio .NET and creating a whole solution / project structure purely in order to test or demonstrate a couple of lines of code. Don't get me wrong - Visual Studio .NET is great, but it's overblown for doing this...