Google Earth has just released an update, and it’s of galactic proportions. They’ve added the ability to look from the centre of the earth toward the heavens – now you can check out start, nebulae, constellations and more. Very cool, especially if you don’t own a whacking great big telescope (or you want to check the... Read more

Mitch Denny has posted details on how he got TFSNow (hosted Team Foundation Server with Team Build) to build Visual Studio 2008 projects. Nicely done, Mitch! Read more

I had a question from Sanchet on the new insert statement syntax in SQL 2008 and the relative performance difference between the two methods.For instance if we take a look at the following statements, they both have the same net result with the difference that the first statement is a single statement using the multiple row... Read more

If you've ever tried to use SQL CE databases on your desktop (instead of on your device) and you don't have Visual Studio installed with the mobile developer extensions then you know there's no simple tools for having a look at what's in the database or changing the schema or data in the database.This is where... Read more

OK, so it's no big surprise that there's a new version coming - as announced at GameFest. The good news is that the XBox Live service will be available to all, and that it will work in any version of Visual Studio.This should make things a lot nicer to work with once it comes out. I'm... Read more

I recently grabbed the new July CTP (CTP4) for SQL 2008 - Katmai. I'm still looking through things, for instance Notification Services has been dropped, and Reporting Services has undergone some serious surgery. One thing that did intrigue me though was a new data type for supporting hierarchical data: hierarchyid. This looks really, really cool. Basically it lets... Read more

Matt Winkler just gave a great talk on using and extending Windows Workflow Rules.  In the session he talked about the different options for accessing the rules engine including the very interesting revelation that you can use the rules engine without using a workflow. In other words you can use the rules engine in your normal... Read more

I'm a big fan of Test Driven Development and so it was great to sit in a TDD session run by Niel Rodyn (Author of Extreme .NET & Microsoft MVP). While there was nothing new for me in this session, it was really good to hear things from someone else's perspective. I've jotted down some of... Read more

Luke Drumm has just presented a session on game development using XNA Game Studio Express.  It was a very enjoyable session with the presentation shown being built using XNA (Luke actually progresses "slides" using a xbox controller). XNA looks like a fair bit of fun for doing homebrew game dev, so here's a few things I've... Read more

It's been a very interesting start to Tech.Ed on the Gold Coast. This morning saw a keynote from AnimalLogic's Micahel Twigg about the process of animation and CG special effects. It was very, very cool (and kind of scary) to see how some of this stuff is done, and just how much detail and effort goes... Read more

'tis the season to be launchingfa la la la, fa la la la.Not only has Readify launched TFSNow, but we're also launching the Readify Developer Network - a free and open session for anyone to come along to and hopefully learn something of interest to them. Webcast versions will also be made available as a resource... Read more

This week I'm off to Tech.Ed Australia. If you'll be there or you're on the Gold Coast and want to catch up, give me a shout.It should be lots of fun and who knows? I might even learn something.Tech.Ed is also going to be the official launch of TFSNow from Readify (the company I work for).... Read more

Ken Schwaber just wrote a post on the ScrumDevelopment group in response to a thread about different types of Scrum and Lean processes. Scrum is a very simple process for managing complex work. It has many areas in which it is quiet, such as engineering practices, planning and estimating approaches, risk management, and others because these... Read more

UPDATE: A post showing how this works in TFS 2010 is now availableIn this post I want to show you one way to add a version file to a web site project and a version number to a business layer DLL based on the latest changeset number for your code in TFS, all through a single... Read more

This came up during a discussion about meta data for table rows on the Readify internal mailing list. Wouldn't it be nice to have a way to logically delete rows in a table, i.e. make it so that they were available for looking up information like descriptions and so forth but in general did not come... Read more

CruiseControl.NET version 1.3 was recently released and apart from being a native .NET 2.0 application it also included a new feature called integration queues.So how does this work? Let's say you have a number of projects in CC.NET with dependencies on other projects. Maybe one is a set of libraries common to a number of projects,... Read more

Microsoft finally delivered a decent source control with the release of Team Foundation Server giving the thousands of development teams still using SourceSafe a way to move forward.But what do you do it you've got CruiseControl.NET running against a VSS repository. Thankfully there is a way to hook CruiseControl.NET into a TFS source repository and it's... Read more

I was looking at some forum signatures recently and noticed that they had a URL link to add a persons contact into Windows Live Messenger. Being curious, I has a look at the URL and noticed that there was a custom URL protocol being used - msnim:[email protected], how would I know to do that and what... Read more

I've been looking at some of the new features in the SQL 2008 (Katmai) June CTP today. Here's some of the interesting things I has a look at 1. Multiple Value Inserts In one statement, it's now possible to insert multiple records, and not by batching changes. As an example: insert into factbuyinghabits values (707, 11794,... Read more

I've read a bit about Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) in the past, but I've never done real-world with it.  Recently I've been doing a bit of work helping a client get a proof of concept solution up and running for an SOA based forms workflow environment. I've been using state based workflows, getting my head around... Read more