Roy Osherove just posted a blog entry about database projects. He ends his entry with “Very nice.” Just wanted to thank you, Roy - I passed on your entry to the team here. Always nice to get the occasional kudos. <g> D'oh! Jackie...

My boss forwarded me this blog which is a programming puzzle challenge: given a phone number, try to create a mnemonic, like 800-776-4726 is 800-PROGRAM He knows that I’ve been writing word games on computers for years: I decoded a spelling...

Rick Strahl had some problems with his Tech Preview - it killed ASP.NET and the IIS Management Console. Now, this hasn't happened to everyone (in the blogs I've been checking, most people have been fine), but if it happens to you, we've worked out the...

I just came across this - and had to post it. Some things just tickle that geek funny bone - y'know? Anyway, it's a SQL Script for an analog clock . <g> Here are the results on my machine: AnalogClock -------------------------------------...

Sometime sitting around with experienced consultants and developers you hear some interesting stories on less-than-optimal situations they were placed in when coding or implementing a solution. An associate of mine years ago told me about racing to...

Before Microsoft made the mistake of actually hiring me (heh), I worked as a vendor to the company for the VFP 6 certification tests. The test teams always debated what could reasonably be expected knowledge of a developer. You see, at that time the concept...

Before I came to Microsoft, I ran a consulting firm called Flash Creative Management with my partner, David Blumenthal. One of our first projects was to find software for a department of a large publishing company. The person in charge of the department...

As Robert Green notes on his blog , the first Tech Preview for VS 2005 was given out this week at VSLive . I'm really psyched about these previews because I think that they'll help to make our software better and our beta cycle shorter. Why? One purpose...

Just wanted to say thanks to the great folks at BAADD and the South Bay Visual Foxpro User Group for hosting me last Thursday night in Mountain View, CA. It was a lot of fun – I “threw away” my powerpoint slides and did a couple of hours...

VFP hosting ActiveX control made with Visual Studio 2003 on Win98 The other day, one of our support engineers, Brad Peterson, came into my office and described a problem to me and asked for my help. A customer has an ActiveX control that had...

To add to what yag says in his entry below about community. Ricardo Wenger can also be listed among those names for contributing significantly to the improved community activity at Microsoft (internally and externally). Ricardo is the former group manager...

Just wanted to point to an awesome post by Josh (yo, Josh – it’s Alan or Yair or yag, not Alen <g>). Ken Levy and I were interviewed today for Scoble’s “Channel 9” – and we got into a bit of a discussion of community...

I was involved in an email thread this week about optimization and a discussion of the ability to prepare SQL statements (as ADO, ADO.NET and Fox all let you do) before running them came up. There is an on going misconception about prepare. There are...

For background information, please refer to my prior post on this topic. Also, there's an excellent paper on advanced COM and VFP in particular, located at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnfoxgen7/html/vfpandcom.asp ...

Learn how to use the Tablet PC Platform SDK to capture digital ink, recognize handwriting in Visual FoxPro applications, handle events raised by Tablet PC controls, and persist ink to files. We've tested extensively with VFP 8.0 and Tablet PCs to make...

A while ago, I wrote about the David Allen seminar “Getting Things Done” that I took here at Microsoft. Well, after some prompting by Scoble , Jason Womack now has a blog. Subscribed.

Earlier I mentioned that Paul Vick is on a Roll . I’ve gotta say that Steven Clarke rocks. He’s been doing a killer set of blog entries on the cognitive dimensions framework used to help determine API usability. He posted another today . The...

Here's another useful thing for you MSDE users. People are often confused by the workload governor in MSDE - they think that MSDE is limited in number of users. This whitepaper explains how the governor actually works - and shows how things scale in MSDE...

I've been in meetings and on email threads this past week kicking off the process within Microsoft to create the new product (branding, packaging, rebates, etc) for Visual FoxPro 9.0. We are thinking of including a screen shot on the back of the box this...

There have been some questions in the VFP community about what issues there are with Visual FoxPro applications under Windows XP SP2. At this time, we're still testing but we do know some basic information. Basically, the vast majority of applications...

OK, here is my first blog entry on the new VS Data weblog. Entering my first blog entry reminds me of a line from a movie called What About Bob with Bill Murray, but instead of saying “I'm sailing“, I'll now say “Hey, I'm blogging! I...

Like many others, I use Newsgator as my news aggregator – allowing me to use Outlook for all my reading. Thanks to a post by KC Lemson, I went to Greg Reinacker’s blog and found how to move some of the posts to my smartphone. One Newsgator...

I was reading the Universal Thread (one of the many great 3 rd party sites I go through every week) and came across a question by Kevin Goff who wanted to know more about the SQL enhancements coming in Visual FoxPro 9. In addition to the information that...

I realized I forgot to post this when we started the blog... The SQL Server Web Data Administrator is available for free download. It's a light weight, web-based administration tool for SQL Server or MSDE databases. I've heard from many of you over...

Paul Vick's book The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language is available from online sources, and should be in your local store soon. Paul's one of the key language designers on the VB team here, and I've had the pleasure of working with him on a number...