The Release Candidate is now available and the name for Visual Studio 11 is announced as Visual Studio 2012, complete with a new logo: Loads of updates included in this, with a couple that I’d highlight: 1. You don’t need to uninstall the Beta – the RC...

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...

  F# is now one of the managed languages that comes with Visual Studio. If you haven’t had the chance to look into F# yet then this free workshop, with a key note from Don Syme (creator of F#) could an excellent introduction. It’s being run by Microsoft...

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...

For me, there are a lot of similarities between an application developed for Windows Phone and a Metro style app developed for Windows 8. A Windows Phone 7 application (rather than an XNA game) is built in .NET and XAML against a subset of the .NET framework...

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...

One of the things that I’ve seen at a number of the Windows 8 Developer Camps that we’ve been running across the country is that a subset of the .NET developers that are coming along are confronted with something that they haven’t seen before – asynchronous...

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...

Over the weekend of 15/16th June we’ll be running an exclusive 2 day event designed to help you get your Windows Phone app onto Windows 8 and into the Windows Store. To participate, you must have a Windows Phone app in the Marketplace. Image by BUILDWindows...

I’ve been meaning to update the UML Design Patterns extension I put together a while ago and have finally got round to it. There are no functional changes, I’ve just changed the VSIX installer to allow it to be installed into Visual Studio 11 as well...

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...

If you’ve recently attended one of our Windows 8 Events or Windows 8 Camps (London, Edinburgh, Manchester, London again, Birmingham etc etc) then you may have asked us about how you can get hold of the materials. You’ll be pleased to hear that the official...

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...

A quick plug for an event in London on the 22nd June. Scott Guthrie will be in the UK and will be keynoting a 4-track event on the Microsoft Cloud. You can grab tickets here: http://azureconference2012.eventbrite.com/ and the first 50 look to be free...

There comes a time when you’ll want to see a list of all the Metro style app packages installed on your Windows 8 machine. Occasionally you may need to do this in order to fix a registration issue – I’ve seen this happen occasionally in Consumer Preview...

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...