Thom Robbins .NET Weblog

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost nine years ago that I started at Microsoft. It seems such a long time ago. During that time I have had the opportunity to be part of some amazing things. But like all things people change - me included! I have...

Ramp Up ( www.MyRampUp.com ) is a free online learning program for developers. We’ve just launched a new track: SharePoint for Developers, Part 2 . This track, along with the other currently offered ones (eg, Visual Studio 2008), teaches the important...

Helps spread the word and make sure to register! Event Date: April 1 Event Cost: Free Event Location: Your PC (worldwide access) With speakers starting to confirm we have published twenty session and will be adding more on a daily basis for the...

One of the things that I always love about the technical world is our love of learning. Personally, I find it incredible to hear the different ways that people solve day to problems and their personal best practices. In thinking about this a great group...

Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions will teach you about the benefits of the latest virtualization technologies and how to plan, implement, and manage virtual infrastructure solutions. The technologies covered include: Windows Server 2008...

This is always something that I hear people ask for – The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a simple tool that installs Microsoft's entire Web Platform, including IIS, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and...

Pretty cool idea for a messenger translation bot

This looks pretty cool – We are very excited to take the wraps off of our newest addition to .Net client development – a Starter Kit designed to make it easy to create rich, syndicated multimedia and content experiences which engage the user, from...

XML literals are new to Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Basic. Simply put they enable the incorporation of XML directly into application code. Essentially this allows a quick way to create XML objects. At their core XML literals represent a LINQ to XML...

Tabs are everywhere within Visual Studio. By default each time a new window is opened a new tab is creates. Many times a lot of tabs can make moving around quickly seem a bit difficult. Within Visual Studio the <CTRL> + <TAB> key open a dialog...

Regardless of the new framework features – copy and paste is still one of my favorites. One of my favorite tricks is selecting a block of text. By default normal text selection is line by line. For example it’s not possible to select just the items to...

Ramp Up has just launched a brand-new learning track today: SharePoint for Developers, Part I . This track, along with the other currently offered tracks (eg, Visual Studio 2008), teaches the important skills in a guided path, making the learning process...

Question: I am new to building Windows forms’ applications and am writing my first application. It’s a basic application that has three different forms. As you can imagine I am building, deigning and architecting the project as I go along. One of these...

Via Brian Give us feedback on Silverlight 2 We’ve put together a short survey to help us improve our Silverlight features and API. Spend 15 minutes and tell us what is good and bad about Silverlight so far.

The lambda expression is new to Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2008 and part of the new Linq support. A lambda expression is an anonymous function that can contain expressions and statements. Basically it’s a function without a name that calculates and...

Application installation and patching: http://survey.confirmit.com/wix/p761108781.aspx?htype=1 The Windows engineering teams are putting together plans for how application installation and patching will work in future versions of the operating system...

In case you haven't seen this - During the keynote at PubCon in Las Vegas we announced “Project Silk Road” which is a collection of services, including a new version of the Live Search APIs for developer community – basically Search API 2.0 Beta...

Question: I am new to Visual Basic and wanted to create an access key for my Windows Form application. How can I do that? Answer: By definition an access key is an underlined character in the text of a menu or the label of a control. The idea of an...

Whether you are learning new features, increasing job performance and productivity or deepening your expertise, Microsoft Learning can help get you prepared and make you an expert. Microsoft Learning Materials are the most reliable and up-to-date source...

Very cool site I just checked out at www.dotnetvideos.net . They have over 100+ videos under 10 minutes duration dedicated to .net developers around the world. All of the training videos are visualized version of data tutorials by Scott Mitchell on asp...

Today, registration opens for Tech·Ed U.S 2008 at www.microsoft.com/teched . Tech·Ed is Microsoft’s premier technical gathering for IT Professionals and Developers worldwide. Tech·Ed provides both audiences with top-notch technical education, connection...

Some great stuff to check out - Whether you are learning new features, improving expertise, increasing your productivity or just staying ahead of the curve, Microsoft Learning can help you get up to speed quickly. Microsoft Learning materials are the...

LIVE DEMOS. REAL CODE. HOT NEW INFO. The 2008 Microsoft Office System Developer Conference February 10-13, San Jose California ODC 2008 is the premier event for Microsoft Office and SharePoint developers, bringing together architects, developers...

Try Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 in a virtual lab and learn more about accessing relational data using Language Integrated Query (LINQ) to SQL or how Visual Studio 2008 integrates with .NET Framework 3.5. Virtual labs are simple, with no complex setup...

Very cool – AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft is an open-source development tool aimed to bring the Visual Studio experience to building World of Warcraft addons. This is the first release of the project and there are lots more ideas around how it...