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...

by David Britch I recently joined a project developing a Windows 8 Metro application using C++. It had been a while since I’d written any C++ and I subsequently discovered that C++ has changed. A lot. WinRT is the framework and library for...

By Dave Sussman . DDD, the UK's premier community developer day, is usually at the beginning of the year, but due to unforeseen circumstances had to be postponed. The green light has now been given and we can exclusively announce that DDD Reading will...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

The Visual Studio team has received lots of feedback on the Visual Studio 11 Beta UI and has implemented some important changes to the UI as a direct response. Check out Jason Zander’s blog and the Visual Studio blog for all the details. Please...

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 Ben Robb . Often, developers new to SharePoint can get lost in the new world they encounter – with strange, obscure acronyms and terminology. There is a steep learning curve for developers and team leads starting their first development project...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

by Ian Haynes . One of the new CSS3 constructs that gets less attention than it deserves is that of ‘root em’ font sizing, normally know as ‘rem’. This makes all font sizes relative to the root <html> element of a page...

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...

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...

By Robert Chapman . Microsoft has announced a fundamental change to its certification program, heralding a ‘return’ for the MCSE, MCSA and MCSD certifications. New certifications Microsoft has introduced a set of ‘new’...

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...

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...

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...