On 7th June in London 15 start-ups from across Europe will get five minutes to pitch their business on stage to Europe’s most successful venture capitalists. No pressure! It’s worth the preparation – in 2010 UK company Artesian Solutions...

By Jen Stirrup Want to know how to write better SQL queries? It’s possible to write SQL badly. However, if your application depends on data retrieval and updates, then it is crucial to the performance of your application. Therefore, it is important...

By Ian Haynes Having been working on mobile-first designs recently it occurred to me briefly that if I didn’t use respond.js, browsers not supporting media queries would see the mobile view. Looking for something else on the net I then found...

By Andy Hodges . So you have been given a project and been told to build your company Intranet, but you have not had experience of SharePoint 2010, where do you start? Capture some requirements, install SharePoint out of the box or undertaking a pilot...

Markus McCormick, an escalation engineer working in Microsoft support in the UK talks about the most common support issues they see coming in to the support centre. He gives advice on how to avoid these pitfalls. If you are new to Windows Azure – don...

By Ian Haynes . HTML5 brings several new form input types; email, number, url, date etc, and new properties; placeholder, autofocus, required and so on. All of these are ‘fail safe’ in that they are treated as standard text input boxes...

By Tarun Arora . I recently came across a problem that clients run into when the builds they are working on fail because an associated test failed. But with TFS 2010 there is no way of identifying the failed test error message unless one downloads...

The Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow is coming to over 20 countries, including the UK in London (14th June) and Edinburgh (15th June), where Microsoft MVPs bring you all you need to know about Windows Server 2012. A Microsoft Windows Server 2012...

By Ian Haynes . Sometimes simply floating everything ‘left’ (particularly images) in a responsive page layout isn’t the ideal option. You end up having empty spaces with some screen sizes and awkward looking layouts with others. The...

by Gary Ewan Park . No, really, Scott Hanselman is coming to Scotland I am very happy to announce that Scott Hanselman ( @shanselman ) is doing a User Group tour of Scotland in July. He is going to be over here for 1 week, and while he is here he...

This event will cover the key new features and capabilities that Visual Studio 11 offers software development teams, and the opportunity to ask questions to the UK Developer Tools team and partners. There’ll be something for almost anyone involved...

The people behind the official Windows Azure training and development kits are speaking in London on 22 nd June, find out more at http://azureconference2012.eventbrite.com/ . Go on, you know you want to ;)

By Andrew Fryer There’s a perception that developers and IT Professionals don’t always get along. Possibly the reason for this is the friction that can arise during deployment, part of which involves a database like SQL Server. Some of...

By Andrew Westgarth . With the increasing desire to provide the most fluid and responsive web applications we possibly can, one of the challenges which developers face is how to build real-time data rich web applications. A project I have been taking...

Join SharePoint MVP Andrew Woodward on 31st May in Birmingham for an exclusive workshop that provides hands-on practical application of the use of Serious Games techniques to improve the quality of business requirements and facilitate deep user and business...

By Jen Stirrup Is SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a victim of its own success? For many developers, it is possible to ‘get by’ in SSIS – in other words, it is possible to pull and push data around, using the easy-to-use...

The keynote speaker for the UK Windows Azure conference on 22 nd in London will be Scott Guthrie, the Microsoft corporate vice president in charge of the development platform for Windows Azure. Find out more and register at http://azureconference2012...

Before I highlight the content in this month’s issue, a little bird told me (OK, it was Liam Westley ) that the MSDN Magazine is now available on your Kindle, thanks to open source eBook tool, Calibre . Get the full details from Liam’s blog...

If you’re building or considering building applications for the cloud, then the 22 nd June is a date for the diary. It’s a big day for Windows Azure as the first full day, multi-track conference supported by Microsoft and London Windows Azure...

By Ben Robb SharePoint tools haven't been forgotten in the new wave of developer productivity tooling. The new Visual Studio 11 Beta includes all the familiar tooling from VS 2010, with some additional extensions to: - Create lists and content types...

Join the Windows Phone UK Developer Reward Programme Today! It’s simple. Every successful and original app published in the marketplace gets you one point to exchange for a range of substantial state-of-the-art goodies. You can choose something...

by Ian Haynes Creating site navigation that scales well from mobile up to desktop can be a challenge. This article by Brad Frost looks at some of the solutions that can be used. http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/web/responsive-nav-patterns/ Author...

Ever found yourself in the helpless situation where you think you’ve tried every possible suggestion on the Internet to bring the build server back but it just won't work? Tarun Arora , Visual Studio ALM MVP, has created this video to help you understand...