Last week I blogged about our work on being open about API deprecation. We've posted a document that goes through the steps we're going to be taking in marking an API obsolete and deprecating it. The key is that we'll be obsoleting things over a period...

For a project at work, I recently downloaded and was messing around with a third-party tool. While this is not a review, I wanted to comment on the field repository concept. A field repository is kind of like domains in other databases or parent classes...

A number of us have been working on a standard approach for letting people know early what is being deprecated between releases of the framework. We have an early look at MsCorLib available on Brad's blog. The idea here is that the deprecated members...

This is really cool. Roy Osherove , Mike Gunderloy , Frans Bouma and (maybe) Rory Blyth have gotten together and are running a Most useful addin/macro for Visual Studio .NET contest. Check out the rules and the prizes !

In Robert's description of our keynote this week, he includes some sample code from our demo of Visual Studio Tools for Office. The demo showed expenses from a web service being use to fill an Excel expense report. Eric Carter describes some of the programming...

Clay has a great post about what a full test pass is all about here at Microsoft. He also gets into some of the new control designer capabilities of VS 2005. If you're interested in seeing a real test case, this is the post for you.

Congrats to the VB team for starting up a “frequently asked questions” blog . I've been hoping to see this since I always enjoy the C# one as well. I think having the VB MVPs involved is a great idea - and I hope other teams pick up on this...

Speaking of rock stars (why do I keep mistyping that as “starts”?), Paul Vick is interviewed by Dev Source in their “.NET Rock Stars” series. I have got to bring green M&Ms to my next meeting with Paul. <g>

Well, it's been a busy and fun conference here at VS Connections . The keynote went well - Robert beat me to a description . I've enjoyed meeting with a bunch of people here - both folks that I already knew, and some new ones. People seem to be pretty...

Earlier this month, the MVP Summit brought about 1,500 MVPs to Microsoft in Seattle, 30 of which were VFP MVPs. During the summit conference, the VFP MVPs spent a full day with key members of the VFP team receiving exclusive demos of new features in VFP...

In early June the VFP team will release a public beta of VFP 9.0 for free download on msdn.com . To correspond with that release, Microsoft will be releasing several new technical whitepapers on msdn.com about the VFP 9.0 beta. In addition, articles about...

I came across this article on CodeProject . Alberto Venditti wrote an application that can be used to stress test your SQL Server 2000 database. I haven't gone into it in depth yet, but it looked interesting enough that I wanted to let y'all know that...

Interesting blog post and comments at Kent Tegels site. It discusses whether you should focus on the database design or the application UI first. I'll post some comments about this later - probably after I return at the end of next week.

It's 3:51am, and I just finished packing for my flight to Orlando. I'll be at VS Connections next week - say hello if you're there. With my free time, I'm gonna try to post a bunch of random things that I've been collecting. Clear the decks as it were...

A lot of the new reports UI is controlled by what's in the system variable _REPORTBUILDER. Wanna play with the new UI? Leave it as is. Wanna run legacy UI? Enter _REPORTBUILDER = “” from the Command Window. The new extensions to the Report...

Thanks to a tip on Channel 9 , I've found out about the Microsoft Architecture Journal . Note that to download the PDF you must register, but the articles also show up online. As an example, the first issue contains: Best Practices for Rule-Based...

Sometimes you just get things that tickle your funny bone... A video of a dog on a skateboard . Leads me to google the topic... And I get 49,100 hits. The internet is a wonderful thing...

Julia posted about Maryam today. Just wanted to say “ditto”. It was a great dinner - and pretty funny watching Robert's head peek around the partition every time Maryam started talking about him. <g> That's what happens when two groups...

Just catching up on my newsgator folders and saw that there's a beta download of an AS/400 Data Provider available from IBM. Pretty cool.

Alan Griver (yag) and I were interviewed together for the new Channel 9 video weblog on http://channel9.msdn.com . Both interviews mention Visual FoxPro, our new XML tools coming in Visual Studio 2005, and other tools that the VS Data team is working...

There are two new DevCenters on msdn.com, the Visual Studio 2005 Developer Center and the XML DevCenter . A great article titled All About Blogs and RSS online from MSDN Magazine, April 2004. Tip: The msdn.com domain name auto redirects to...

Hey there - just confirmed my flights for two conferences in Europe: The Prague VFP Conference - June 22-24 Tech Ed Europe - June 29 - July 2 Tim Sneath has a list of reasons to attend Tech Ed Europe, and the Universal Thread has a report...

Got a little sneak preview of the phoenix of FoxTalk. Looks really good. David Stevenson is now editing; he's the former editor of CoDe magazine and has a journalist background from before then as well. Marcia Akins and Andy Kramek are going to spice...

So tonight at the MVP summit we were having a dinner at the company cafeteria nearest our offices. I went into the cafeteria right before the 1st MVPs showed up, determined to reserve enough space so that the Fox MVPs could sit together. Found two tables...

As I said before in this blog , I have an optimized version of a program to solve a programming challenge To recap, the challenge was to enumerate the possible phrases that can be obtained from a phone number, like 625-329-4741 is MakeAWish1 ...