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Its great when you provide feedback to Microsoft and it gets heard. In April I suggested that the MSDN Community Distribution program should include beta and CTP content as they are typically the bandwidth killers for developers in countries like South Africa. So the June 2007 CD is coming with a DVD packed with CTP goodness. The June 2007 CD contents includes: 7 tracks for beginners using Visual Studio 2005 Express and covering topics such as object oriented fundamentals, Windows Forms based user...
Two of the Microsoft ADO.NET team members, Mark Shields and Fabio Valbuena, have put a rather detailed post discussing EntitySQL. EntitySQL has been developed to address the need for programmers to reason, express and write queries in terms of the new Entity Data Model abstractions. One of the cool benefits of EntitySQL is that the developer can truly work in a data provider agnostic fashion as the language merely provides a means of querying the enhanced data model that is provided by the Entity...
Yesterday Microsoft unveiled a new technology aptly named Microsoft Surface and occasionally referred to as Microsoft Surface Computing. What is it? Simply put its a 30-inch tabletop display whose unique abilities allow for several people to work independently or simultaneously without a mouse or keyboard. Basically you control the user experience with your finger and from the demo videos it can recognise other objects like cellphones and credit cards as well. Personally I don't know how it can...
Last month I posted about my shocking experience with Microsoft Direct Services. Luckily Ahmed picked up my post and forwarded it to a an escalation specialist inside Microsoft South Africa. The very same day (2nd of May) I suddenly got an e-mail from the Microsoft Direct Services agent telling me that my Office Home and Student 2007 and Outlook 2007 media would be with me on the 11th of May 2007. I tried to reply to the e-mail and got it forwarded back to me with a German quote line. So I tried...
As a developer that grew up on Delphi 1.0 through Delphi 7.0 I am a little saddened at what has happened to Delphi as a product. I recall the local Borland Delphi 8.0 launch where they touted that Delphi was now a first class citizen on the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 and that their product releases would coincide with the framework releases. Unfortunately this didn't seem to materialise as I waited at least a few months for updates to Delphi 8.0 to support service pack 1 of the .NET framework 1...
JetBrains have released version 2.5.2 of their wonderful refactoring and guidance tool ReSharper . I must say that the product has come a long way since they started adding support for Visual Studio 2005. I don't know what I'd do without it. Its great to see that they are already working on support for Orcas and have their ReSharper 3.0 EAP (Early Access Program) available for all to try. One pity is that they don't support Visual Studio Express editions but apparently this is due to...
When I previously posted about Microsoft listening to its customers in terms of the Technology Guarrantee for Microsoft Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2007 I was quite impressed with them. Right now though I'm getting rather annoyed and frustrated. They received my upgrade form including product box tops on the 10th of April 2007 by registered letter - I wasn't going to let the South African postal service screw up my upgrade. I then received a very cryptic e-mail from Microsoft Direct Services...
It seems that Microsoft does listen to its customers afterall. In January I decided to buy Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003 (Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint) as it was on special for under R1000 and had a Technology Guarantee sticker on it. There was only one problem with this whole scheme, the details about the guarantee were unknown at the time. When I filled in the redemption form in March I realised that the new version named Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 (Word,...
Recently I posted some reservations on LINQ and in particular LINQ to SQL and the usage of stored procedures. After numerous comments from respected community members I have furthered my quest on the subject and found a very interesting blog entry by Mark Seemann where he shares his thoughts on how LINQ to SQL will impact database development best practices. I feel that he shares my thoughts on the subject and he raises some interesting comments. I am a firm believer in the current database development...
I happened to stumble upon the blog of Mike Taulty and the following three very interesting articles on how LINQ actually works. The first article looks at Lambda expressions and introduces the interface IQueryable<T> which inherits from IEnumerable<T> and Expression property to represent the expression tree ( Expression<T> ). The second article explores the IQueryable<T> interface a bit more and applies it to a simple array of integers to explain the concepts. The third article...
According to this post by the Microsoft XML team , MSXML 4.0 is going end of life near the end of 2007 due to security concerns in conjunction with Internet Explorer. The team recommends that all web developers using MSXML 4.0 as an ActiveX control to switch to MSXML 6.0 SP1. Note that this doesn't affect applications other than Internet Explorer but it is still advisable to switch to the newer and improved version 6.0 SP1. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it...
Often I hear the cries from Xbox LIVE members here in South Africa. Microsoft releases an update to the Xbox 360 firmware (aka the Dashboard et al) and you are prompted to download it over the often horrendous South African international bandwidth. I was quite impressed to find the following blog post making life a lot easier. Turns out the firmware is just over 6mb compressed, not too bad for the average user and I'm sure it will download faster than from the console itself. Its also a cool...
Recently I stumbled upon a rather useful SQL Server 2005 Best Practices section on Microsoft TechNet and I thought others might find it useful. In particular I found the internal function to identify missing indexes based on runtime statistics recorded by the query optimizer quite useful. Just remember it is intended as a guide toward optimization. I find it useful to analyse a running database under typical workload and then determine what indexes could make a major performance impact. Just a pity...
Yesterday the much awaited SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 was released to the web. Significant changes include: the ability to run maintenance plans without SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) installed performance improvements to the plan cache to make more effective use of physical memory reversal of the SP1 change to SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (SSRS) where multivalue report parameters lost the Select All option Windows Vista support Note that the links for the express edition don...
After months of testing Microsoft's freely available game development product has gone gold according to the team blog entry . At the same time the XNA Creators Club subscription was added to the Xbox Live Marketplace enabling hobbyist and indie game developers to start testing and sharing their creations on the Xbox 360 platform. Built on top of Visual Studio 2005 C# Express Edition and the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 this is surely the best game development platform currently on the market...
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