Community Blogs

Sorry, I did not work with MS OfficeLive documents yet. But, nevertheless, I think the idea could be of some interest. All these billions of ubiquitous sensors around us doing their routine everyday work. Why not let them log their data directly to SQL server database that backs up MS OfficeLive documents? For example if I had a number of temperature and other types of sensors around my home, I’d like to store it somehow and process and represent the result in convenient way. Normally I should buy some hardware to connect the sensors to PC, develop some software to acquire the data and store it into MS Access or Excel, then somehow process it and show the result. Too much hassle. Why not buy some hub that would talk to SQL server database under...

The web works better when web sites are tailored to the capabilities of the platform. That's a given, as far as I am concerned.  I have avoiding dealing with this issue in the past in terms of mobile devices in the hopes that the browsers mobile phones will eventually mature to point of approaching desktop capabilities.  Also, I am sure that there is some amount of push back to browser quirkiness following the Netscape/IE browser quirk wars of the past decades. But now, as I await delivery of an iPhone 3G, I wonder if I might be doing more to push development for the mobile platform in general. For example, I have used the Opera 9.5 browser (a leaked beta :) on my HTC TyTN for the past few months and I am amazed by how fluidly...

Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying out the Sprint Instinct touch screen phone to see how I liked it. I wrote my initial review here and posted some tips and tricks on using the device here . The poor browsing experience on the Instinct finally led me to take it back to the store yesterday so I’m back to using my PPC-6700 until Sprint releases the HTC Touch Diamond (or Pro) later this year. Although I’ll admit that I have to reboot my Windows mobile phone every other day or so, it was really hard giving up all of the flexibility. The Instinct had a great touch screen, many excellent features (especially the GPS capabilities and visual voice mail), but the lack of EVDO Rev A speed (even though it’s supposedly built-in…although I never got...

Chris Craft has done a great job in getting a lot of people excited over using .NET for Mobile Applications.  He has created a new application each day for 30 days.  Some of these are not too complicated, but they are all very cool.  With Read More......( read more ) Read More...

  Many have found it difficult to establish a VPN connection on Windows Mobile 5. There are quite a few blog posts out there with instructions, but none are really that complete. Before you can establish a connection from your mobile device, you need to establish a VPN server. For my purposes, I've setup Routing and Remoting Access on a Windows Server 2003 box ( Windows Server 2008 procedure ). This is pretty simple to do and there weren't any settings I needed to modify. Then, on the user account in my domain, I had to right-click and go to properties. There is a section under the Account tab called Account Properties. Click the checkbox that says "Store password using reversible encryption." Now that VPN is setup on...

In keeping with my apparent "theme" this week of providing you with some Silverlight detail refreshers, I want to bring-up the topic of Silverlight for mobile platforms. While it has been widely known since the earliest days of Silverlight that mobile platforms would be supported, little attention (or scrutiny) has really been applied to the portable plug-in. In fact, if I were to ask you to tell me about Silverlight's mobile plans right now, you'd probably list these details: The plug-in will not require you to change your Silverlight code (build once, deploy everywhere- ideally ) The mobile plug-in will be available for Microsoft Windows Mobile and Nokia S40/S60 and Internet Tablet platforms. Microsoft is actively trying...

According to Gizmodo, the iPhone 3G launch date will be June 9th. It will be interesting to see what further market share the iPhone will capture with this latest phone. I know many individuals have held out from purchasing an iPhone because of the lack of 3G support. It will also be interesting to see what phones other providers will release to compete with the iPhone. For more details, visit http://tinyurl.com/5pe7pc . Read More...

I know it's unrelated to .NET but I'm a Mac person, so I've been really drawn in to the iPhone SDK. Am I the only one from the Microsoft developer community? I've even started up a blog and forum dedicated to the topic: http://www.iphonedevsdk.com...( read more ) Read More...

Adam Kinney recently twittered about some videos that Don Burnett posted from Mix 08 for Silverlight Mobile that are really cool. Silverlight 2.0 has some great features and I think the mobile offering (once released) will really simplify the process of building mobile applications. Cool stuff! If you're interested in learning more about Silverlight 2.0 you can view 8 videos I put together based upon Scott Guthrie's written tutorials. Read More...

I am a software developer and architect (currently using Microsoft technologies) so of course I was interested to watch the sessions from the MIX conference that just happened last week in Las Vegas. Incidentally, I visited the on-demand web site for MIX using my default browser (Safari on Mac) and of course the page wouldn't load. Go figure - a web page written by Microsoft that doesn't work in Safari, a standards-compliant browser. But I digress. Ray Ozzie is just not a good public speaker. He didn't seem excited at all (and he sure didn't get ME excited with his subject matter). His talk sounded like he was reading a newspaper article, not engaging the audience. In addition, his slides had whole movies playing with demos while...