I know many developers who rely on Virtual PC 2004 these days, both for application compatibility testing purposes and also for beta testing releases of Visual Studio 2005 ("Whidbey") and SQL Server 2005 ("Yukon"). A few colleagues and I have been trying...

I've come across the situation on a number of occasions when coding where I've wanted to convert from a string to an enum . In the Media Catalog sample, I resorted to one giant switch statement that has a case block for each string that returns an enum...

[Updated: This is the final list of sessions, based on some of the suggestions in the comments below...] I want to do something which I don't think has ever happened before: invite open peer feedback on one of the TechEd Europe tracks before it's completely...

If you're attending TechEd Europe this year, you may be interested to know that we're running a series of "birds of a feather" (BOF) sessions throughout the conference. The idea is simple - if you want to host an interactive discussion with other attendees...

Amidst all the hype around Whidbey and Yukon, one area that's been perhaps neglected is the fairly significant changes that have been made to ADO.NET. Having spent a fair amount of time working with customers on data-driven applications, there are a number...

It's often hard to find good UK-aware regular expressions (for use with the ASP.NET RegularExpressionValidator or the .NET RegEx class). I was therefore delighted to come across RegExLib.com , which contains a most comprehensive listing of commonly used...

I don't normally comment on security issues, mostly because it's not my specialist subject. It's fair to say though that our record hasn't always been admirable in years gone by, as Slashdot and others gleefully point out. But sometimes perception starts...

Just watching the webcast following on from the Sun / Microsoft settlement. I can't tell you how odd it feels as a Microsoft employee to see Scott McNealy (Sun CEO) and Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) sitting next to each other on a press conference stage...

I want to do something which I don't think has ever happened before: invite open peer feedback on one of the TechEd 2004 Europe tracks before it's completely finalised. We've been working hard to come up with the best sessions we can create or find on...