This week’s featured article comes from Mark Bloodworth, formally of BBC Worldwide and now working as an Architect Evangelist at Microsoft. Mark talks about PEX a framework for application testing. Pex is a tool that allows you to explore code and understand...

In this MSDN magazine article, Joseph Fultz provides some guidelines for deciding which storage mechanism to use in the cloud, evaluating the needs of the solution and the solution team against the features and the constraints for both Windows Azure Table...

Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools are a set of extensions to Visual Studio Professional (and above) which improves developer productivity. In this third major release of the Power Tools we’ve made significant improvements to the Solution Navigator...

It’s time to announce the winner of last week’s photo caption competition. Here’s a reminder of the challenge we set: We settled upon something of a risqué winning caption from @Gary_J_H . Not sure your mother would approve, Gary, but it made us snigger...

The Windows Phone User Group (WPUG) exists to help UK based developers who are interested in Windows Phone 7. WPUG gets together every month in London, providing a great opportunity to hear and learn from developers in the community (plus special speakers...

The weekend’s in sight, folks! It’s been a fun week on the blog, with our Valentine’s Day caption competition providing many a laugh. If your entry wins we’ll be in touch on Monday. Here’s this week’s round up. Have a wonderful weekend. A day in the life...

Over on the TechNet blog we’ve been running a series of day in the life posts chatting to Microsofties about what they get up to during the 9-5. This week we met Simon Ince, an ADM, or Application Development Manager, working with customers as part of...

I was at a recent user group meeting in London attended by Silverlight developers and others interested in the platform and a straw poll provided an interesting bit of insight. The poll question was: “Who uses Expression Blend?” The response was a very...

At this week’s Mobile World Congress Microsoft revealed new Windows Phone features, discussed early momentum and outlined the future of its mobile communications business. Here’s a summary of what was announced. You can read a more in-depth report on...

Join the 72 hour conversation at MIX – see the latest tools and technologies and draw inspiration from a professional community of your peers and experts. Get one free hotel night, while quantities last. Find out more on the MIX11 website.

In this MSDN magazine article Mike Kelly explains some basic logging, tracing and debugging techniques used for server applications. He then dives into how these techniques can be employed for your Windows Azure projects. Along the way you’ll see how...

Love is all around this fine Monday morning – happy Valentine’s Day! What’s that you say? No cards, no flowers, no…nothing? Well, never mind, dry your tears – we still love you. To show our affection we’ve got some goodies to give away . Think up a caption...

Busy week, or what! The UK MSDN team’s fingertips are on fire – thank goodness it’s the weekend (the boss has gone home, so we can too, right?). Next week, to celebrate Valentine’s Day, we’ll be spreading the love by reviving our famous photo caption...

It’s Friday, so when you’ve finished exploring the IE9 release candidate , why not ease yourself into the weekend with some WP7 fun. The team at Black Marble have been busy creating a fun tactical tile game perfect that promises to be nicely addictive...

As I sit down to write this article, CES 2011 (Consumer Electronics Show) was nearly a month ago and it has taken this long to get over it and get back to normality! The venue for CES 2011 was Las Vegas (as I am sure everyone probably realises by now...

Visit the Internet Explorer 9 developer centre on MSDN and get easy access to the RC, features, highlights and a pile of links to IE-related team blogs. Get started with the tools and tips you need here .

I’ve just heard the news the Nokia and Windows Phone 7 will go into a strategic partnership which will involve Nokia adopting Windows Phone as it’s core smartphone platform. Quite amazing news for Windows Phone as it will ensure the devices are in more...

Today we launched the release candidate of IE9 and with it a few new features. You can download the RC here .     GeoLocation From a developers perspective one of the most interesting new features is native support for GeoLocation.  The...

Join Lynn Langit as she explains how you get started with SQL Azure development. Here’s a quick intro – you can read the full feature on MSDN . It’s long, but good. This article will explain the differences between SQL Server and SQL Azure. You need to...

Take a moment for some personal development…this virtual lab helps you to take advantage of the new ASP.NET Project Templates, control server control ClientIds, enable bi-directional routing support, and control the View State at application and page...

Installing Umbraco on Azure Every two weeks we ask members of the community to submit technical articles to the MSDN Flash, but I felt a little guilty about asking people to sacrifice a few hours of their own time if I wasn't willing to do it myself....

Ever heard of Layer Diagrams? Before the following video, I hadn’t (slap my wrists). In this video Michael Stephenson talks about Layer Diagrams and why they are important for BizTalk. Michael shows how Layer Diagrams can be used to communicate and enforce...

The future of the web is at MIX11, Apr 12-14 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Register by Feb 11 and save $500 + free hotel night. Find out why you should be there.

Hot off the press, here are details of the Windows Phone developer tools January update. This summary comes courtesy of Brandon Watson, Microsoft Developer Experience Developer. Read the full version here on the Windows Phone Developer blog . This update...