Community Blogs

I had my first "real" day at Microsoft today (the first day is mostly an HR thing). There's still a great deal of stuff to do to really get settled, as anyone who has ever started a developer job knows, but it felt like I actually worked there today. I'll be working on the forums team in Server & Tools Online, which owns the forums on the MSDN site, among others. Since I'm only at a point where I'm trying to find the restrooms, I'm not sure yet what kinds of things I'll be able to blog about, but given the fairly non-proprietary nature of what we do in that group, I hope to be able to blog more. Over the last few years I've not posted a lot here outside of stuff relevant to CoasterBuzz , one of my own...

Due to Visual WebGui cloud application platform, developers can now deploy their applications to Windows Azure with the click of a button with no re-writes or new programming skills needed. “(now we can) quickly achieve what, a year ago, would have taken more people, more money, and a lot more time. It’s going to open up applications of sorts we’ve never seen before.” The ease of using Visual WebGui was a key benefit. Noted Naylor, “There was no learning curve with Visual WebGui. To a Windows developer...( read more ) Read More...

This week, I'm at Streaming Media West in San Jose, California. Seeing the sun, blue skies and relatively warm weather is a pleasant change from the rain swept northwest. Today is a special pre-conference half-day workshop on Live Broadcasting with Silverlight and Windows Media , which my colleague Chris Knowlton is running. We're videotaping it for posterity and will get it posted as soon as we can. On Wednesday morning, Marc Whitten, GM of Xbox Live will be delivering the keynote at 9am...( read more ) Read More...

Just about two years ago I joined Microsoft . I'm fortunate to work in a home office with a great team that I now lead . We work for the group at Microsoft that runs MSDN , TechNet , ASP.NET , Silverlight.NET , WindowsClient.NET , basically all the Read More......( read more ) Read More...

PDC is here again! This year my friend and colleague Don Demsak and Andrew Brust will be presenting a business intelligence (BI) workshop covers some of the fundamental patterns and techniques that can help developers to build modern BI applications in the Microsoft platform. Specifically, the workshop will focus on how to merge the traditional aspects of BI solutions such as analytics, reporting, data aggregation into widely adopted technologies like SharePoint Server and Office in general. If you...( read more ) Read More...

If you heard about Microsoft Oxite CMS, this is the new one, created as a different project to avoid previous developer comments.: From Press: Microsoft's open-source CMS platform is (re)born | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4506 Project Homepage: http://orchard.codeplex.com Quote From Press: The guesses (by me and others) look like they were on target. The “Orchard Project,” which is getting its debut on November 11 at Tech Ed Europe is, indeed, the successor to the Microsoft Oxite content-management system (CMS) . Microsoft made available the first the open-source Oxite CMS bits at the end of 2008 . Like Oxite, Orchard will be a free, open-source CMS platform — plus a set of shared components for building...

Microsoft has released a new Facebook SDK Version 3.0 (other than their old not-so-great one) and it looks to have not just updated APIs but also wide range of features supported in many application types. Quoting a related blog post from c|net “The web services report” blog: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10393823-26.html Microsoft on Monday released a software development kit for Facebook that allows developers to create Facebook applications for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation . This should expand the reach of Facebook in third-party applications as well as make Silverlight and WPF more viable platforms for developers looking to build social applications. A screenshot showing off the NewsFeed control for WPF. (Credit: The...

Some cool guys (all working in ITWorx I guess, one of the biggest Egyptian Software houses) have created a new website: http://www.sharepoint4arabs.com The website, as the name implies, is dedicated for ARABIC resources related to SharePoint. It originally contained the technical blogs of the site founders ( Founders' Blogs ) which are very useful for posts about SharePoint, then very recently they have also lunched Screencasts (Also in Arabic) that start from the very beginning until further advanced stuff. I think you’ll enjoy them! SharePoint 4 Arab Homepage Founders' Blogs Ayman El-Hattab Marwan Tarek Mohamed Yehia Screencasts I hope you like them,   Technorati Tags: Arabic , MOSS , SharePoint , Video , Videos , Screencasts...

Next Tuesday (November 10th) my colleague Uri Katsir will be presenting a session at the South Florida BizTalk Users Group about improving agility in large BizTalk environments using the ESB toolkit. If you are a BizTalk developer or operations architect working on complex BizTalk deployments you MUST attend Uri's session . In order to keep things in perspective, Uri has prepared a series of interesting demos that illustrate the techniques used to improve the development and management experience...( read more ) Read More...

Microsoft has released a final version of its book “ Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition ”. The book is described as: This guide is available online here in the MSDN Library and will be available in the Fall of 2009 as a Microsoft Press book, ISBN# 9780735627109, that you can purchase through local and online booksellers. The guide is intended to help developers and solution architects design and build effective, high quality applications using the Microsoft platform and the .NET Framework more quickly and with less risk; it provides guidance for using architecture principles, design principles, and patterns that are tried and trusted. The guidance is presented in sections that correspond to major architecture and design focus...