I touched down yesterday in Toronto, Canada, where I'm going to spend Christmas with my family in their home about two hours north of the city. The suburbs of Toronto are covered now with a beautiful, classically Canadian dusting of snow. Thanks to all of you for your part in an incredible year. I'm too sappy right now to go into detail (must be the effects of maple syrup), but it's been a pleasure to meet and work with such talented, diverse and interesting people. I wish you all a very enjoyable

"Do you think we can get it working again?" I asked Scott, as he opened up the Marsellus Wallace briefcase to reveal the bits of a disassembled brain-computer interface. Here we were on a Saturday morning, in Gary's stunning office space overlooking Saint Stephen's Green in the heart of Dublin, with the sun streaming through bay windows onto a desk just waiting to be covered with electronics gear. A week ago, I'd visited the University College Dublin to meet with former colleague Ed Lalor, who, in

In this week's MSDN Flash Ireland editorial, I reflected on Steve Ballmer's visit to Dublin and looked toward our next focus: the November launch events. I've been eagerly awaiting the official photos from the SteveB visit. Here are a few half-decent photos here I took of the various SteveB events I attended. Flash Ireland contains a bi-weekly summary of what we're up to here in the Developer and Platform group, and also includes customizable links to new MSDN articles of interest. Sign up for it

I'm down to Waterford tonight to talk about SQL Server 2005 at the local INDA usergroup . If you're down in the southeast, come on out and I look forward to seeing you at Dooley's Hotel. Just a bit of personal interest to round out my blog for today. Gamasutra (a site devoted to the art and science of making games) has an interesting write-up on the Games for Health conference . The piece works as a thoughtful survey paper on a number of ways people are using interactive techniques to contribute

The internet is abuzz with news from the early proceedings here at the PDC in Los Angeles. Keep up with all the announcements at the MSDN PDC site . I posted my first set of PDC photos up at my MSN Space . Most of the shots are from the 2 keynotes. I thought it may be nice for some of you to put faces to famous names. The Office 12 Interface caused a splash yesterday; here are some images of Office 12 that have already hit the web [NOTE: External link, not official content]. The server side of Office

I've been distracted from my attempts to finish my wrap-up to last week's TechEd Europe, and in the interim, Marcus has been very eloquent , and Clare called out my favourite moment from the latter half of the week: Senior VP and CTO David Vaskevitch , in his keynote, observing that we tend to overestimate what’s possible in a two-year time span, but underestimate what we can collectively accomplish in ten years. That makes intuitive sense to me (and I realized afterwards that it applies equally

As Paschal reports, Monday night’s INDA discussion topic was the use of the CLR in SQL Server 2005 . Nick Grattan gave a characteristically thoughtful talk that walked us through the steps involved in hosting .Net assemblies on SQL Server. Nick’s also already blogged the answer to my burning question, which was: what are the proposed best practices for when I should use this new feature ? How does CLR Assembly hosting fit in to the big picture alongside TSQL? It turns out it's a case of with rather

Last Wednesday, Microsoft hosted the MSDN Day Dublin event at my old stomping ground, MediaLabEurope. There were several excellent sessions, and Eric Rudder gave an insightful and lucid keynote on the future of the server technologies. I took some photos, both at the event and at Clare 's afterparty in McGruder's (my old "local" pub). I finally got around to posting some shots here . What a perfect excuse to add a "Photography" category to my blog! After such an enjoyable night out, I'm looking forward