I just got back from the Consumer Electronics Show 2012 (CES) which was held in Las Vegas. This is a good show for me and the company that I work for as it shows us some of the possible future trends of digital media consumption. Things presented at CES may just come and go and be quickly forgotten, but at the same time, there are definite themes on the conference that companies need to pay attention to. 3D is so yesterday! This was actually the second CES that I have been to and both were focused...
I have installed Windows 7 on “bare metal” on one of my machines. This was a laptop that I work with and it was a very easy install. First off, it was the quickest OS install that I have ever experienced. You can tell that Microsoft spent some significant time working on the performance and quality of the install and bravo to the team that worked on that feature! I also used the 64-bit version of the operating system. More and more people are turning to 64-bit and it is really starting to be the...
Yes, we have Windows Server 2008 coming. Yes, also SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, the .NET Framework 3.5, and more - but probably one of the more exciting new items to come at this same time is IIS 7. As Scott Guthrie states in his recent blog post on IIS, this is a major update to the technology. IIS 7 will allow for a plug-in architecture and allows you to take out all the pieces of the IIS stack that your applications don't need. It also allows you to build your own extensions and plug...
As noted to me from Scott Hanselman, Microsoft just released the CTP1 of the XML Schema Explorer. Seems that there are a lot of changes coming in the XML space for the .NET 3.5 release and the XML tools that are currently present in VS2005 will be no more as they are replaced by some new XML tools - the XML Schema Designer being one of them. Here is a screenshot of the new XML Schema Explorer. You can see from this screenshot that the schema is open on the left-hand side of the shot, while the schema...
The big news of the day is that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer introduced Microsoft Surface. A table computer that allows the end user to interact with the computer through their fingertips! No keyboard - no mouse. First thing you should do is take a look at the movies Microsoft made about this: http://www.microsoft.com/su... The ability to drag and drop items around with your fingers. The ability to place a digital camera on the table surface and automatically pull the images / send them / edit them...
I wanted to ... oh yes, I wanted to come to TechEd. It is one of the best conferences out there and it is something that you will find simply overwhelming. I am unable to attend as the product that I have been working on for more than a year for Lipper is about to release (June 15th) and that is tooooo close to be messing around at a conference (no matter how cool I think that conference might be). I have to say though that the product we are releasing (for the financial services industry) is outstanding...
Another book! I and some friends just finished a new release of our Visual Basic book. This is another book I wrote with the wonderful Kent Sharkey! :) We really cleaned up this version of the book. This book came together quite well and shows not only the core of .NET 2.0 in depth - but it also covers the new ground of .NET 3.0. The .NET Framework 3.0 includes the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). The table...
This week marked the release of my latest book - Professional XML. I wrote this with friend Kent Sharkey and some other authors including Michael Kay (editor of the XSLT specification and other things). This book came out really nice and after quickly covering XML - goes straight into covering all the major technologies that are based upon XML. The Amazon site doesn't seem to provide the table of contents at the moment, so here it is: 1. XML Syntax 2. XML Editors 3. XHTML and CSS 4. XFL-FO 5. Document...
I just really started playing around with WPF and XAML and how to build an application in this new format. I really like it, but at the same time, I have a lot to still learn! For my first example, I wanted a form that would have some sort of event that caused UI to change in some manner. For this, I put together a form with a simple Button control on it and a place to put some results on the form after the button is clicked. This form really needs two pieces to work - Window1.xaml and Window1.xaml.cs....
I installed Office 2007 on my laptop. This was for me an upgrade from Office 2003 and the upgrade went beautifully. It launches by asking you for the Office key right at the beginning and you can copy and paste the entire key in at once as it is a single textbox (which is a nice feature). You can also provide the key later and just install Office directly without this key. From there, you are provided two buttons - Upgrade and Custom. For kicks, I pressed the Custom tab to see what it was installing...