Having had a glimpse on the BBC this morning, it looks like Microsoft are intending to shift Windows 7 without IE installed in Europe, it is now something users will have to go and download and install for themselves.  In general, it looks like they’re leaving it up to the hardware vendors to decide what is installed on the machine and what is not, but what happens when user pop out and buy a copy of Windows 7 themselves?  I assume that means that there will just be a link on the desktop to go and download the file, otherwise, I can’t quite see how your average user is going to get on the in... [More]

I found myself with a little time between BizTalk Server tasks recently and decided it was high time I took a look at trying out Silverlight and seeing what it is worth.  It's still early days for me at the moment, but I thought I would share my starting point. I was lucky enough to find a series of posts buy Scott Guthrie that give a good 8-step tutorial on building a Silverlight application in Visual Studio 2008. I've really only just started and am taking the time to read some surrounding content on the web about each step, but I have to say that it looks quite impressive so far (as I thi... [More]

I've just installed Visual Studio 2008 so that I can start evaluating it for potential (read as 'as soon as we're allowed') deployment across the development teams here.  The very first thing that I notice was understandable but still rather disapointing. As you may have read, Visual Studio 2008 will allow you to work with different .Net Framework versions (namely 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5).  This is great, sort of.  What I noticed was that the Solution and Project files are not compatible between Visual Studio versions.  Whenever you open a Visual Studio 2005 Project/Solution, Visual Studio 2008 ... [More]

So we have .Net 2.0 and we also have .Net 3.0 (which is really just .Net 2.0 with a bunch of extra cool stuff added).  What more, well - .Net 3.5 is on the horizon.  This really is a new release of the framework and, unlike 3.0, also is accompanied by a new version of Visual Studio .Net. Right now this new version is in Beta 1 and its possible a little flakey.  I have it installed on my machine, but irritatingly I can't do anything as there are no templates asides from the Empty Solution template.  I got a little miffed at this, but nicely enough, the Express editions are also available in ... [More]

Excellent stuff!!  I popped along to this event yesterday in Reading.  It was all very last minute for me as someone else was supposed to be going instead of me. The day itself consisted of four main sessions, each followed by a quick 'how-to' session for Office 2007.  Basic summary of what was covered is:  LINQ and .Net language enhancements, AJAX, XAML, Data Advances in VS 'Orcas' and Windows Live. By far, I was most interested in the LINQ and language parts, which also tied in very nicely with the Data Advances in VS 'Orcas' session.  So much so, that I'm currently installing Orcas on... [More]

While I was geeking out as often happens reading up on some WCF I found this nice little blog about the next version of C#, .Net and Visual Studio. Exciting stuff as it is, there is not too much to go on here.  I'm looking forward to finding out more about this in due time!