At Microsoft UK we run at least one free developer event a week on average, catering for all levels of skill from novice to expert. Over several years of delivering presentations at these events, I've built up an array of presentations on different aspects of .NET development, ranging from introductory overviews to in-depth "under the hood"...

Following on from the discussion earlier in the month about Windows XP Service Pack 2 changes, we've now posted the first Release Candidate on the web for download. The good news is that it's available to everyone, MSDN subscriber or not, so you've now got a couple of months to check your application for compatibility before it is finally...

Rick describes this great story from the annals of the Word team. Have you ever come across a company like this before?

There's been alarm expressed in certain quarters following reports like this one suggesting that Windows XP Service Pack 2 could break some existing applications. I wanted to counter this somewhat, or at least provide some potential remedies for those of you who are developing software today that needs to be tested against this new release...

This is cool - don't know why I haven't come across it before... From the website: The World-Wide Media eXchange (WWMX) is a centralized index of digital photos, where photos are tagged by the geographic location where they were shot.  It's an experimental research project run by the Interactive Visual Media Group at Microsoft...

I've managed to get my hands on a SPOT watch, which is the latest geek toy doing the rounds in Redmond. These watches can pull down Outlook appointments, instant messages, news updates and so on using MSN and some FM subcarrier technology. Unfortunately, I'm based in the UK, which means I'm out of range for these services at the moment. It's still...

Thanks to Private Eye for pointing out this fantastic mission statement on the Lake Geneva Forum website. See how many words you can read before it blurs into incomprehensibility! Our Challenge:Providing a neutral platform of discourse to capture, explore and integrate a systems view of things in order to unleash and bring together the creative...

I've been following the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity with great interest since they arrived on the surface of Mars. The complexities of managing two robots and the associated software from millions of miles away intrigue me, particularly the way they diagnosed the flash memory problems on Spirit with almost no information to work from. Now...

I'm not a heavy Visual FoxPro user - although it is installed on my development machine - but I've often admired some of its capabilities. Although it doesn't mesh desperately closely with the general .NET architecture, it is a relatively powerful database development environment that can count some of the most loyal and vocal customers that I've...

I delivered a three-session marathon at the Belux Developer & IT Pro conference on Tuesday, covering .NET for IT Professionals. As I've mentioned previously in my blog, I'm on a one-man mission to improve the dearth of information available for system administrators on deploying, securing and managing the .NET Framework and associated...

Not sure how long this has been around, but I just stumbled across this set of guidelines and tools to support multi-user access to a full Visual Studio .NET development environment via Terminal Services. The material was originally designed for the purpose of supporting a university development environment, but there's little here that wouldn't...

We finally launched an all new MSDN Flash newsletter in the UK today. This is the culmination of a lot of work taking a long hard look at the existing MSDN Flash newsletter and trying to identify all the things we can do to make it more interesting and relevant to developers. We heard your feedback loud and clear that there was not enough...

And whilst talking about smart client apps, this entry from new blogger Chris Pratley describes how OneNote came about. I use this product an awful lot, although I've never understood why it's not just an extension for Word rather than a separate product. I presumed that OneNote came from work by Microsoft Research rather than a discussion between...

If you're a UK- or US-based ISV starting to build smart client applications with .NET, you might want to take advantage of this programme to get a free starter kit containing books and software (US version here). Thanks to Paul for the link.

It would be great to build a community of British-based bloggers who are writing about .NET and related technology. So I've started the ball rolling by creating a list of all the bloggers known to me who fall into that category. So - who am I missing?