And so is Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Final.The official release is still next week, but it's publicly available for MSDN subscribers :-) Read more

Work is selling a telco comms rack and a bunch of anti glare monitors.If you live in the Sydney area and are interested try the following ebay linksComms RackAnti Glare screensOf course, if you're not, then you can ignore this post completely :-)UPDATE: These items are both sold now. Read more

In case you aren't aware the 1.03 update for Battelfield 2 is now available. Some nice new features such as comparison to others and the Wake Island map! Download and enjoy :-) Read more

It was a public holiday in Australia yesterday, so my wife & I took the girls to Carrs Park for a play in the park and a swim at the beach.Everything was going great until our youngest daughter (2 years old) managed to step on a sharp rock or clam shell and slice her foot open.... Read more

In the past I've used FeedReader to keep track of RSS feeds, mainly because of it's ability to minimise to the system tray, but I've recently gotten a bit sick of it. It doesn't handle all the feeds that well and it keeps thinking the MSDN feeds have been refreshed when only one or two new... Read more

Following on from PDC Microsoft normally makes a bunch of technologies available for download. This time it's no different.They have just made Team Foundation Server Beta 3 available for download from the MSDN subscribers site.They have also made the Visual Studio 2005 Release Candidate available as well.The best thing about the TFS Beta 3 can be... Read more

ObjectSpaces is reborn! The LINQ project is a codename for Microsoft's new object/relational framework that will be built into .NET 3.0 (yes it's already on the drawing board). The syntax and the inbuilt language integration means that you can do mapping and object retrieval directly in your code without having to reference any other framework(s) and... Read more

The IE team has released a developers toolbar for IE that makes a lot of nifty features available for developers.The story is on the IEBlog website and the download is available as well.Some features that I really like- DOM explorer (as a pinnable toolbar inside IE)- Highlighting of divs, tables, etc- Inbuilt ruler for measuring distances-... Read more

The latest MSDN shipment finally arrived an in it was a shiny new copy of the Longhorn Beta 1 release (aka Windows Vista). I'd thought about downloading it before, but any MSDN download over 1 Gb I usually wait for.My impressions first up were from a user perspective (ignoring all the funky stuff under the hood)... Read more

There's a cool little utility on the Battefield 2 OGN site that generates signatures containing your Battelfield 2 stats.The link is http://bf2.ogn.com.au/getsig.php and there's an example at the bottom of the page. Read more

Microsoft have put out a press release with some screen shots of the various apps in Office. The look and feel is quite a departure from Office 2K3, etc and seems to be built around the Windows Vista (formerly Longhorn) interface with some stylistic "help" from SAP (the diagonal edges to tabs for instance). Check it... Read more

WinFS, the windows filesystem based on SQL server, was meant to be included with Vista (formerly called Longhorn) and no other platform. Well, in a surprising turn of events the file system is now available (in beta form) for use with WinXP. You'll need to be an MSDN subscriber to access the download though. More details... Read more

Andy Budd::Blogography has a heap of useful links about CSS. All sorts of useful things hiding on that page :-) Read more

I've been recently looking through the WeFly 247 DVD from Microsoft (this link is for ordering the kit in Australia). The DVD contains a whole heap of useful demos of the various .NET 2.0 functions (and optionally ships with the Visual Studio beta 2).Among the most interesting things I've seen (so far) was the Visual Studio... Read more

I've been playing around with smart clients recently, trying to evaluate the best way to make them work under .NET 2.0.After figuring it out I then ran across an article on the fabulous codeproject web site that describes how to put together a smart client that utilises a SOA to get data from a .NET 1.1... Read more

I've been playing with VSTO in VS2005 beta 2 today and I can't help but say how impressed I am with the integration capabilities and how easy it is to use. I've always thought office integration was a bit "mickey mouse", but the new version has opened my eyes to lots of possibilities and ways to... Read more

Last week I was travelling for work to a smaller market where we are establishing a presence. During the week we presented at a "user group" style meeting along with 4 other application vendors, most of whom are local and most of whom have been around for many years.We are definitely the foreign outsider company, and... Read more

I had a problem today, where I installed VS.NET 2003 on a laptop in which I had already installed IIS 5.1.The installation went smoothly, but for some reason ASP.NET didn't install, so I couldn't create any ASP.NET projects. I then tried the uninstall/resinstall routine, and that didn't help either.So then I turned my attention to google,... Read more

In re-developing our development environment, I needed to set up a heap of servers. The usual suspects are there - web servers, application servers, database servers, load balancers, build servers, etc. Given that I also needed a test environment and a staging environment, the the number of servers exploded.If I was to go and buy an... Read more

Konfabulator has been purchased by Yahoo and they've now made it available for free. This is great news (at least for me) as I've been using a Mac recently for cross browser compatibility testing and I've kind of fallen in love with the Dashboard (which was ripped off from Konfabulator). Needless to say, it's downloaded now... Read more