A long time since my last post, I know. All in a good cause though, I've been working hard on MCSE training in Portugal for the last month or so. And much as I'm sure you all would've liked to hear about the glorious sunshine there while it chucked it...

So I returned from our global sales conference in Orlando a few weeks ago, MGX (Microsoft Global eXchange, no convoluted acronyms for the sake of coolness here). There were lots of cool demos of upcoming technology, but I think the thing that grabbed...

Showing my age here, but I remember how enormous standard density 3.5" floppy disks seemed when I got my first Amiga, with their amazing capacity of 720 kilobytes. This sort of capacity meant you could fit huge (by those day's standards) graphics files...

So I've just had a conversation with some people who claim there's nothing new or exciting happening in the world of Microsoft technology. I'd be inclined to disagree, and I'm not going to list everything I find interesting here, but I can respect their...

So Will doesn't like filesystems much. I can kind of see his point, though being a developer at heart I'm much more at home with a nice simple hierarchical structure than a magical metadata based ether that I can throw files into. It took me a long time...

I've been setting up a test network using Virtual Server, creating a base Windows 2003 template image and then using differencing disks to customize the individual machines. This creates an interesting problem in that the SID is identical on each machine...

I've been accused of sounding like a marketing drone in my last blog entry, and for that I apologise. But at least people are reading. And please do feel free to comment, I can always delete anything I disagree with :-) Anyway, this Slashdot post on...

So I managed to lock myself out of my flat this weekend. Whilst I was stood there shivering in my woefully inappropriate attire, hoping my flatmates would turn up before I ended up a frozen statue, it gave me time to consider how totally reliant we are...

Pah, who needs a PSP when you can have an Xbox 360 on your lap! The creator of this beast is Ben Heckendorn (he must have strong knees...) NB: Cutting up your Xbox 360 and rearranging the innards may void your warranty

It's been a while since my last video, but hopefully the wait has been worth it - for this time I have voice actors who aren't me! This time we investigate the highly important question everyone's dying to know; that is - what is a mashup? (Yes...

Apologies for the slight (well alright, massive) delay since my last post - a lot has happened in the last few months. Not least of which that I've swallowed the red pill and have moved over to developer land, as an Associate Consultant in the Delivery...

So my journey of learning Monad continues, and I'm now in the realm of variables, functions and control flow. On the UK student technology blog they have a play with MSH and come up with a version of the Fibonacci function (sorry if I spoilt the surprise...

Now looks like a great time to be a developer, with a whole raft of exciting new technologies coming out such as Atlas, WPF and XNA. Atlas is Microsoft's AJAX framework for delivering rich web applications, and frankly just looks a whole lot of fun...

Whilst researching various pieces of new technology the other day someone pointed me towards the Microsoft Virtual Labs, a great tool for exploring the next generation of software before purchase. These Virtual Labs consist of your very own virtual PC...

Got a system design you're burning to share with the world? The beauty of good system design often goes underappreciated, yet is fundamental to ensuring stable, reliable and efficent operation. Well here is your opportunity to demonstrate your creative...

Less than a month until the Microsoft Technical Roadshow 2006 now. This is a series of FREE events starting off in Birmingham and heading round the country throughout May and June. Visit such rocking venues as the National Motorcycle Museum and Dynamic...

Linux (gasp) isn't the dirty word within Microsoft it might once have been. There seems to have been some surprise that we're providing support for running Linux under Virtual Server 2005 R2 . The only thing I've found a little surprising is the amount...

I've decided to bite the bullet and write a gadget for the Vista sidebar. If I can figure out how I'm hoping it'll do some funky MOM monitoring stuff so you can see the status of all your servers with pretty lights etc. In reading up on this I've discovered...

A few people have mentioned this Traffic Information site on their blogs. This has been created using AJAX and Atlas, and is a web application hybrid or 'mash-up*'. The interesting thing to me though is that it works equally well in Firefox as it does...

Here's something cool - the Coding4Fun site. It's created by hobbyists for like-minded people, and there's some interesting projects on there (motion-detecting baby monitoring application anyone?) There's also a whole section devoted to game development...

So hello and welcome to my new blog. I've just joined Microsoft as an IT Pro Evangelist (cool job title huh?), and am now trying to hurriedly get up to speed with a myriad of new technology, in particular Monad and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM)....

It looks like the Monad GUI written by Kark Prosser, MSH Analyzer, is really coming along . Integration of a graphical environment with a command shell is something I wouldn't normally expect to work at all, but it has some innovative features such as...

A colleague recently told me about Pandora Internet Radio , an extremely cool service that builds a personalized streaming radio station based on your listening habits. You tell it the artists you like and then based on this it plays music it thinks you...

Well almost. My silly little video has been mentioned over on Channel 9 now; next stop the world. One comment mentioned the crappy sound quality, sadly that's the best that a £9.99 headset can manage...I'll admit I'm possibly not the world's best voice...

Last Tuesday Microsoft announced the Open Specification Promise , which boils down to a permanent agreement not to sue anyone implementing web services for patent violation. This has been done in consultation with the open source community - to quote...