Amidst all the hype around Whidbey and Yukon, one area that's been perhaps neglected is the fairly significant changes that have been made to ADO.NET. Having spent a fair amount of time working with customers on data-driven applications, there are a number of questions that I get asked almost every time, including: How do I get ADO.NET to make...

I know many developers who rely on Virtual PC 2004 these days, both for application compatibility testing purposes and also for beta testing releases of Visual Studio 2005 ("Whidbey") and SQL Server 2005 ("Yukon"). A few colleagues and I have been trying to track down a little issue for some time, and I wanted to share it more broadly outside...

If you're attending TechEd Europe this year, you may be interested to know that we're running a series of "birds of a feather" (BOF) sessions throughout the conference. The idea is simple - if you want to host an interactive discussion with other attendees on a topic of your choice, we have a room dedicated to this kind of activity. You...

I don't normally comment on security issues, mostly because it's not my specialist subject. It's fair to say though that our record hasn't always been admirable in years gone by, as Slashdot and others gleefully point out. But sometimes perception starts to overtakes reality and comments that are no longer justified start to take on a life of...

I want to do something which I don't think has ever happened before: invite open peer feedback on one of the TechEd 2004 Europe tracks before it's completely finalised. We've been working hard to come up with the best sessions we can create or find on SQL Server and ADO.NET, and finally we're at a list which is more or less complete. There...

It's often hard to find good UK-aware regular expressions (for use with the ASP.NET RegularExpressionValidator or the .NET RegEx class). I was therefore delighted to come across RegExLib.com, which contains a most comprehensive listing of commonly used regular expressions. I wish more US sites would take this into account too - not everyone...

Just watching the webcast following on from the Sun / Microsoft settlement. I can't tell you how odd it feels as a Microsoft employee to see Scott McNealy (Sun CEO) and Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) sitting next to each other on a press conference stage, let alone joking with each other and exchanging ice hockey shirts. We've been very vigorous...

I've come across the situation on a number of occasions when coding where I've wanted to convert from a string to an enum. In the Media Catalog sample, I resorted to one giant switch statement that has a case block for each string that returns an enum from it. One of my colleagues came up with the answer yesterday; it's one of those methods that...

I've been scratching an itch - of the coding variety. For some while now, I've wanted to catalogue all the Windows Media files that I've (legally) ripped over the last year or so, but documentation on MSDN or the broader Internet was scant. So I've hacked together a rather nice little managed wrapper that makes it really easy to get at the...

The one where Tim sells out to the marketing droids... OK, so this is more of a sales pitch than I would normally include in my blog, but I've heard a couple of people over the last week say that they thought TechEd was primarily aimed at IT Pros rather than developers, and I wanted to correct that perception. In Europe, at least, TechEd actually...

I've just come across a nasty bug in some sample code (from us, I'm ashamed to say), that highlights the pitfalls of passing string buffers between managed and unmanaged code. To go back a step or two, I've been trying to create a small application to pull metadata out of Windows Media files so that I can catalogue my music collection...

I love this site - I've been wanting to create something similar for a couple of years: Which countries in the world have you visited? Here's the link you can use to create your own "visited country" map. (Thanks to Paul Bartlett for the link.)

From time to time people ask me what it takes to get employed by Microsoft, usually after having been rebuffed by our recruitment consultants. It sometimes feels like no matter how many skills you have, it's impossible to get considered for a role. It also doesn't help that there's usually heavy competition when Microsoft jobs are...

Dave Verwer asks the question that's on everyone's lips :-)

We've just opened registrations for the new format UK technical roadshow, taking place between April and June in four locations across the country. This should be a pretty good event, actually - we've got three tracks running concurrently across two days, with sessions on SQL Server 2005, ASP.NET 2, Security, Reporting Services and Office. If...