Eric Nelson

MVPs Rob Miles and Andy Wigley are back! Microsoft Learning hosted a Windows Phone 7 Jump Start (plus an update course) last year and it was an absolute…

The perfect solution to the “January blues” is a good solid few hours learning about great technology. The 'Build an app for that' Online Conference is…

<< Slide and Links and next steps for Lap around the Windows Azure Platform session at UK Tech Days | Home | Slides and Links for Windows Azure Platform…

Back in May and June I jointly run a highly successful (IMVHO) training programme on the Windows Azure Platform over a six week period for UK developers…

At the start of August I made a call for speakers for a multi track online conference on the Windows Azure Platform (which resulted in a great bunch of…

Today at VSLive! we announced Visual Studio LightSwitch (link not quite up yet). LightSwitch is intended to be the simplest way to build business…

Yesterday (22nd July 2010) was mvcConf – “the Virtual ASP.NET MVC Conference”. This was an ambitious undertaking by the community to deliver a three…

Developers have been exploring the possibilities opened up by the Windows Azure Platform for Cloud Computing. This book pulls together great articles from…

\UPDATE 26th July: A Japanese version of the book is now [available on slideshare\] Developers have been exploring the possibilities opened up by the…

A new community has popped onto my radar, created and delivered by James Burns, a top chap I have known for many, many years. The aim of the community is…

Like many others signed up to the Windows Azure Platform, I received an email overnight detailing the upcoming database size changes for SQL Azure. I know…

At last week in London (10th and 11th June 2010) I promised several folks I would put up a blog post to more information on IE 9. True to my word (albeit…

\Suggested twitter tag [#selfpacedazure\] ![image](/images/iupdateable/register-now-for-the-uk-windows-azure-self-paced-interactive-learning/0b46658d-image…

IronRuby is a Open Source implementation of the Ruby programming language for.NET, heavily relying on. The project's #1 goal is to be a true Ruby…


At QCon in March we had a booth focused on interoperability out of which came the idea to create an application implemented in both Java and Ruby on…

At Mix we announced that we will be offering a new 50gb size option in June. If you would like to become an early adopter of this new size option before…

Next week (17th March 2010) I am presenting on EF4 at www.devweek.com in London (and Azure on the 18th). Today I wanted to get all the latest bits on my…

\[UPDATED 23/3/2010 with two new links from developmentor on STEs\] I just posted on the bits you need to install to explore all the features of Entity…

If you should stumble across this post and happen to be attending the Scottish Ruby Conference, then please do keep a look out for myself and Edd. We…

\UPDATED 10th March 2010: Edd produced a [2nd post on using IronRuby with WPF/.NET \] If you should stumble across this post and happen to be attending…

When Windows Azure was first released in 2008 the only programming languages you could use were.NET languages such as Visual Basic and C# and the…

I have previously posted on the area of Test Doubles and Mocking under the guise of Project NEric. I also have blogged on specific tools such as Pex and…

Something a little different. No mentions of web roles, nodes or queues – but interesting nevertheless. Brad Smith gave Microsoft’s vision of cloud…

\\] Awareness of the existence of the Windows Azure Platform TCO and ROI Calculator remains pretty low based on some conversations I have had lately at…

As part of Microsoft UKs Azure Awareness Week in February (2010) we have three training workshops for partners taking place.

Lots of folks keep asking me for UK prices and to be fair it does take a little work to find them (You need to start here and bring up this pop up)

This question keeps coming up. Hence I will have a stab at explaining it. First I think we can all happily agree that the following service on Windows…

Which is fantastic news. I’m really looking forward to it especially as the UK team are planning to put on a great week for UK developers with the help of…

You can learn the Windows Azure Platform and develop against it locally on your own machine using only the SDK and a copy of Visual Studio (details here)…

You can learn the Windows Azure Platform and develop against it locally on your own machine using only the SDK and a copy of Visual Studio (details here)…

In June 2009 we created a survey for UK developers to tell us how they prefer to learn about technology which we used as input into planning for a number…

Nope, I’m not referring to the ). I am referring to the “data-as-a-service” offering we announced at the PDC. What it is:

I talk to Hadi Hariri about the differences between Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and Test Driven Development - and why Hadi chooses BDD every time.…

Entity Framework v1 did not support a commonly implemented ORM feature called Lazy Loading. Entity Framework 4 adds that feature. In Beta 1 it was known…

Complex Types make it easier to work with objects, allowing the grouping of related properties in Entities and the reuse of these groupings across…

Anyway, I have been asked this one so many times lately that I felt a more public answer was needed. The short answer is: Mostly. Certainly it is good…

Entity Framework 4 relies significantly on the Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) to generate code from the EDM.

I have been working with T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) lately thanks to the Entity Framework team moving their code generation model over to…

Code generation from the Entity Data Model (EDM) has changed significantly in version 4 of the Entity Framework. The product does retain a backwardly…

When adding an Entity Data Model to a project you are given the option to: - Generate the Model from an existing database (SQL Server, Oracle etc) or -…

It is Friday 13th Nov 2009 - which means it is the last day of TechEd Europe in Berlin. Overall I have had a good week – high quality sessions, lots of…

No? Nor me. (If you are wondering what Mocking is, check out my previous post on Mocking, Stubs and Test Doubles.)

I have had a bit of a “SQL Azure” day at TechEd Europe. I sat through David Robinsons excellent intro to SQL Azure development (smooth, on time, great…

At the start of 2009 we worked with InnerWorkings to help over 7000 UK developers get access to free training in C# or VB. As there are at least 100,000…

The team and I were having a conversation about developers (we do that from time to time). It went something like:

This podcast accompanies the October 8th edition of the MSDN Flash newsletter. It is an interview with Paul Jackson which is meant to be about the article…

\[Initual release 22nd Sept 2009\] \[Updated 23rd Sept, with links from Julie Lerman\] \[Updated 2nd Oct, with slidedeck section\] \[Large Update 15th Dec…

I started to play with Moq a few weeks back under the guise of Project NEric and then… real work got in the way. However I am today revisiting mocking as…

I am in step 1 of Project NEric. Step 1 is “Identify the specific technologies, tools and approaches I want to explore”. There are a lot of possible tools…

This is the second pilot podcast to accompany the fortnightly MSDN Flash newsletter (Check out Pilot Show 1) I am working through issues around getting…

\Update 29/04/2009: I recommend you also take a look at the supersite [Windows 7 RC Review and which allows Windows XP applications to run unchanged\]

\[The official announcement is in this Wednesdays MSDN Flash – but why wait!\] Every two weeks we send an email out to tens of thousands of UK based…

While chatting with Tim Ewald last week at Devweek we got onto the topic of “ways to improve the MSDN experience” (Tim sits in that team). Part of that…

Today I delivered a session introducing Entity Framework at www.devweek.com. I expanded the session to include a brief overview of the new stuff we should…

I documented the results from the recent Visual Basic survey we carried out in the UK but decided not to include any conclusions I drew from it as I was…

This is part 2 of 3. - Part 1 – Language and Framework Usage - Part 2 – Visual Basic 6.0 Usage Today (This one!) - Part 3 – Move from Visual Basic 6.0 to…

In January we created a survey to understand how folks were using Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual Basic .NET in the UK. This survey was sent out to…

This is part 3 of 3 - Part 1 – Language and Framework Usage - Part 2 – Visual Basic 6.0 Usage Today - Part 3 – Move from Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET (This…

I first started looking at ORM tools in 2002 when we announced a preview of ObjectSpaces at the PDC. I thought it would be fun to find a list from those…

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<< What you can expect from IUpdateable | Home | LINQPad - my best friend:-) >> The world of LINQ in a concept map.

We have a rather impressive set of new technologies for working with data – LINQ, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, Data Services, ASP.NET Dynamic Data etc.

\[Check out other guest posts if you like this one. They are often better than mine!\] One thing I miss about being the Technical Editor of the UK MSDN…

On January 1st I switched focus to 100% Azure. My friend and colleague David Gristwood has been firmly focused on Azure through 2009 working with early…

<< Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard vs 3rd Party Migration Tools | Home | Whatever happened to.NET ORM tool X? >> Note: This is a temporary page until we…