According to today's Independent, an Australian man yesterday became the world's oldest skydiver, beating the record previously set by a 94 year old Norwegian. Frank Moody, aged 101 years old, accepted a drunken dare from his mates and jumped in tandem with an experienced skydiver from 9,900 feet. I'm not quite sure which part of the story...

FotoVision has released to the web (thanks to Ed Kaim for drawing this to my attention). This is a fantastic new smart client application suite developed by Vertigo Software (some of the brightest developers I know, who were also responsible for the original release of IBuySpy, Quake II on .NET and many other Microsoft samples). The...

In respond to popular demand from attendees who want to plan their schedule in advance, I've taken an extract of the current session database as an Excel spreadsheet. Hope this helps you make the most of TechEd Europe!

Just a fortnight to go now until TechEd Europe. The schedule is now completed, the attendee website goes live this afternoon, and session voting has started. A quick explanation of session voting: when you log in to the attendee website for the first time, you'll be offered the opportunity to select which sessions you think you'll attend at the...

Selling Son's Beloved PlayStation 2 as a Punishment! Xbox owners are better behaved, of course... :-)

If so, we're keen to hear from you...

It's six months since I started to compile a list of .NET developers in the UK who blog. As a microcosm of the overall expansion of blogging, it's been an interesting experiment. The original list had just 17 names on it. As of today, I've recorded a total of 59 blogs on Microsoft development topics from UK-based authors - over treble the...

It's nigh-on impossible to keep track of all the varied products and announcements from Microsoft even as an employee, let alone as a customer! It took someone external (thanks Damir!) to alert me to Microsoft Creative House Expression, a vector-based illustration and graphics tool we acquired last year and have now released for no charge on...

TechEd Europe commences in three weeks from today! As of this morning, we've finally finished locking down the sessions and speakers, which is a major milestone in the planning process. We've taken some of the feedback from TechEd US on board and made some minor adjustments here and there; I'm pretty happy with the resulting session...

Mike Gunderloy always comes up with the goods when it comes to cool new software. Yesterday he pointed to the winners of the Tablet PC development contest that PC Magazine has been running since last year's PDC. The well-deserved winner (in my opinion) was one of the coolest utilities I've seen for a long while: a handwriting to font...

The technical beta for Windows Media Player 10 has just released to microsoft.com. As indicated in this article from news.com, some of the most significant features will only become clear once new digital media players become available, but there's some nice stuff here nevertheless, including a new user interface and improved jukebox settings...

I've already blogged about this topic in some depth (1 2 3 4), so I've highlighted a few notes of interest from Ramachandran and Makesh's session: Restricting the CLRNot all of the Base Class Libraries in the .NET Framework are available in the database. Functionality "not applicable" to the database is disallowed. Most of System.* is...

Michele Leroux Bustamente presented an insightful guide to the extensible capabilities of the ASP.NET architecture.IIS and ASP.NET ConfigurationHTTP requests in IIS arrive at the appropriate extension: aspnet_isapi.dll or asp.dll. ASP.NET requests get passed through to the ASP.NET runtime. It's this application that processes incoming...

SQL Server 2005 contains a completely rearchitected web services layer. Rather than relying on IIS to provide the web protocol stack, Yukon merely uses HTTP.SYS (the new kernel mode driver in Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Service Pack 2). This means you don't need IIS to be installed, which will be a great boon to many database...

Visual Studio is moving from a developer-focused to a development-focused environment. Visual Studio Team System is an extensible life-cycle tools platform that helps software teams collaborate to reduce the complexity of delivering solutions. The three design goals were: Reduce complexity of managing software products; Facilitate communication...