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July 2008 - Posts

Tuesday, July 29, 2008 4:02 PM

See you in a week – have fun :-)

<Body>TODO – add content here :-)</Body>
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
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Monday, July 28, 2008 1:31 PM

Windows Vista vs Apple Macintosh? Nah – Atari vs Amiga is the real question.

I spotted Mike had posted on Windows Vista and that we find ourselves in a strange place. We have a product that is way better than the perception amongst “those in the know”. First up – I really was not a fan of Vista on day one of release. I had a lot
Posted by Eric Nelson | 32 Comments
Monday, July 28, 2008 12:20 PM

UK MSDN events now scheduled

Topics have been chosen, venues confirmed and details posted on our events site . We will be showing up at 6 cities through Sept and October with a lot of the content focused on Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. Me – I will be delivering the “data bit”
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Friday, July 25, 2008 2:46 PM

How come nobody ever told me about LINQPad?

I need to know so much more about LINQ than I currently do. What I wanted was a “Query Analyser” for LINQ – rather than keep writing code inside Visual Studio. I can’t tell you how excited I was when I discovered LINQPad .  It is written by Joseph
Posted by Eric Nelson | 3 Comments
Friday, July 25, 2008 11:08 AM

The "reddit effect”

Yesterday I posted on Developer vs “the others” .I started to notice lots of comments coming in and then a serious number of page views - probably 10 times my norm. The reason was it ended up on reddit . This was all rather fascinating for me – I have
Posted by Eric Nelson | 3 Comments
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Thursday, July 24, 2008 10:33 AM

Developer vs “the others”

[UPDATED 25th - check out http://blogs.msdn.com/ericnel/archive/2008/07/25/the-reddit-effect.aspx as well] Software companies have (broadly) Managers Marketeers Sales people Technical people who don’t code Technical people who do code (much as you do)
Posted by Eric Nelson | 14 Comments
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Wednesday, July 23, 2008 4:47 PM

Is this really me?

You may have spotted that the others in my team have caricatures – well, mine just landed in my Inbox. Cripes – is that really me? I look so … geeky :-)  
Posted by Eric Nelson | 7 Comments
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Wednesday, July 23, 2008 2:16 AM

Great WPF application?

Today I set aside sometime to watch some “random podcasts”. Ok, not that random in that I decided they either had to be about Entity Framework or WPF. The WPF episode I chose turned out to be a great choice – a real world line of business application
Posted by Eric Nelson | 2 Comments
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 1:59 AM

ReMix UK 08 Speakers announced

I will be attending ReMix but currently no one needs me to speak (phew – that would require a lot of learning!). The good news is there are some great speakers now lined up. Mike has called out some of the dev track speakers already but I wanted to quickly
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 1:31 AM

Converting from C# to Visual Basic .NET

I have been playing with tools to convert C# over to Visual Basic - given how many samples only exist as C# :-(. I posted a detailed list + recommendation over on Goto 100 .
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Friday, July 18, 2008 10:58 PM

Biztalk Services adds Workflow – Orchestrate in the Cloud

Just spotted we have added workflow to Biztalk Services .  Sweet. Technorati Tags: Biztalk , Workflow
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Friday, July 18, 2008 7:21 PM

I am installing SQL Server 2008 – not that I planned to :-)

I am looking at the list of things I planned to do today. It does not say “Install SQL Server 2008 RC0”. Yet here I am at 7pm still playing around with SQL Server. It went roughly like this. My notebook was only running SQL Server 2005 Express SP2 Microsoft
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
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Friday, July 18, 2008 10:13 AM

Vista and CHM issues

Every so often I open a CHM and I get the table of contents but no actual contents. I have looked before for the answer, found it, remembered it for a few weeks – then forgotten all about it again. Maybe if I actually write it down, I won’t forget again
Posted by Eric Nelson | 3 Comments
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Thursday, July 17, 2008 5:11 PM

The more I learn, the more I don't know...

Or to put it another way - my head is about to explode... Ok - In real terms I  am on day 9 of my new role and my return to being a developer. I have learnt the following: I am very much enjoying looking at code again I am currently terrible at writing
Posted by Eric Nelson | 6 Comments
Thursday, July 17, 2008 2:38 PM

Visual Basic samples for WPF book - Applications = Code + Markup

Once again, Ged Meads work on WPF catches my eye. A big thanks to Ged, Young Joo and Evan Lim for converting the C# samples over to Visual Basic for Petzolds book on WPF (Only 3 left in stock at Amazon UK - lets get those sold as well - but be warned,
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 2:53 PM

Three good reads on REST

Since 2002 (and .NET Framework 1.0) many of us have digging into Web Services based on SOAP, WSDL and the WS-* specification universe. In 2005 I started to get concerned about the complexity that WS-* was bringing, when ultimately in many scenarios I
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 10:16 AM

Which UK Developer Bloggers do you read regularly?

Over the last two weeks I have built up an impressive FeedDemon collection of top notch bloggers on Microsoft development technology (which is pretty much making my head explode). I have been surprised to find that I have added very few UK based folks
Posted by Eric Nelson | 3 Comments
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Monday, July 14, 2008 2:05 PM

Ron Jacobs is back on Channel 9 - endpoint.tv

Ron was the great host of ArCast.TV for many years but he (like myself) has switched role and elected to return to Visual Studio and late nights getting code to run :-) Ron switched to be a technology evangelist like myself - but with a specific focus
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Monday, July 14, 2008 10:05 AM

Code Snippets - friend or foe?

This is really a thinly disguised test of zoho polls - but also an interesting topic to me as I get back into development. Code Snippets in Visual Studio 2008  have reached a level where they are very useful to "get the job done". However 
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Sunday, July 13, 2008 10:13 PM

Just reclaimed 17GB of disk space without uninstalling or deleting a single file!!!

My notebook was down to the last 800MB of disk space. Amazingly I just claimed back 17GB through Windows Vista Disk Cleanup! Wow! The big wins were: It turned off Hibernate functionality for me - which I never used (3.4GB) It got rid of a bunch of dmp
Posted by Eric Nelson | 3 Comments
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Sunday, July 13, 2008 8:59 PM

40% off .NET Books (UK)

I posted details over at Goto100 - enjoy!
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
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Thursday, July 10, 2008 7:16 PM

How big is big enough?

As I get back into development I am struck by a simple truth - two monitors makes you a much more productive developer than one. On the basis of that I have unhooked my monitor from my games machine and stuck it in the back of my notebook (which is spec'd
Posted by Eric Nelson | 2 Comments
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Tuesday, July 08, 2008 2:31 PM

Entity Framework v2.0 development underway (and very open!)

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is very strategic to Microsoft - but a) it is a V1.0 technology (although we have been dabbling for some time - remember ObjectSpaces in 2004) and b) it hasn't actually shipped yet. BUT... the good news is V1.0 is pretty much
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, July 08, 2008 8:50 AM

Where is the WPF Datagrid control?

WPF is an awesome technology - but it has the odd "beauty spot". One example is the absence of a DataGrid control. WPF 3.0 shipped in Nov 2006 without a DataGrid WPF 3.5 shipped in Nov 2007, alas again without a DataGrid WPF 3.5 SP1 will ship
Posted by Eric Nelson | 4 Comments
Monday, July 07, 2008 10:20 PM

Building a "brand new application" - WPF, ADO.NET Data Services, LINQ to Entities with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

At the end of June I run workshops with 2 ISVs both looking to completely re-develop their applications. One is entirely VB6, the other a combination of VB6 with C++. The beauty of "starting from scratch" with a one to two year development plan
Posted by Eric Nelson | 2 Comments
Thursday, July 03, 2008 8:38 PM

Father Christmas, the BBC Micro and the typewriter

My first ever computer was the Sinclair ZX80 ("Powerful enough to run a Nuclear Power Station" - with 1KB of RAM). But my second computer and the one that got me totally hooked was the BBC Micro . I haven't thought about my BBC Micro for many
Posted by Eric Nelson | 10 Comments
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Tuesday, July 01, 2008 8:08 AM

Day one of new role

Its official, today I start my new role as a Developer Evangelist alongside Mike and Mike . What stops: Visiting and working with ISVs on early adoption of technologies Drawing on whiteboards Running early adoption readiness programs Completing account
Posted by Eric Nelson | 2 Comments
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Tuesday, July 01, 2008 12:05 AM

Presenting code.... VS2008 to the rescue

I previously posted about getting back into regularly presenting which included a great link to 11 top tips. One of those was font sizes. A colleague pointed me at this post by Sara explaining just how much control you have in the VS2008 IDE.  It
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