Foo Theory

So we’re back from Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC09) which was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center this past week. The focus of PDC is future and emerging Microsoft technologies, product roadmaps, and industry trends – making it the premier, developer-focused Microsoft event. It is not held every year. The workshops, ...

American political journalism, not only by association, is not held in the highest regard these days.  NBC's Tim Russert, in contrast, and his enthusiasm for the "truth" is a throw-back and considered among the best of modern American journalists.  Tim provided tough and thoughtful coverage of the most important issues ...

So anyone who's worked on projects with me knows I'm an advocate of using the Enterprise Library for addressing typical cross-cutting application concerns.  Enterprise Library 4.0 was released yesterday which now works with Visual Studio 2008 and the netfx3.5 and includes the Unity IoC application block.  The Application Block ...

I broke my arm a couple weeks ago.  No, that's not the reason I've not blogged in a while: I've just been ridiculous busy - no excuse, I need to get on it.  So I came down off the boat in the garage and my feet got caught up in the trailer.  I came down on both hands, but harder on the right, breaking both the ulna and ...

Update [1/30/2008]: here is another hot of the press product comparison.   So I've had a number of folks ask about Visual Studio 2008 editions recently but quick searches for updated product comparisons, till now, have been fruitless.  Yesterday, though, a colleague of mine at Statêra asked and I finally reached out to Heuer ...

So I always import my standard fonts and colors options for Visual Studio each time I build out a new environment.  I find the defaults a bit straining for all day work.  Today, though, I was installing some developer tools and noticed while wiring PowerShell to VSCmdShell that it used the default VS Command Window colors: stark - black ...

So I was doing a little research for our Thursday presentation: I wanted to included some information on CRM and it's multi-tenant capabilities.  I found my way to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM UK Blog and in the left navbar I read a headline "CRM 4.0 Has Shipped": I thought nah - RC0 only released 4 weeks ago.  Reading further - ...

Next week (Thursday, December 20th) we'll be presenting the ArcReady: Software Plus Services (S+S) Distilled session at the MSDN Power Series Event in Phoenix.  Bennie and I will cover, in some detail, a multi-tenant software + services reference architecture.  The two other sessions that are being presented around ours by Joe Shirey ...

This is a list of my must haves: Foxit Reader (I hate Adobe Reader) Beyond Compare ...  

Matt's Tools Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 (side-by-side) + - Notepad - CruiseControl.NET - Notepad2 - Rhino Mocks - ReSharper (R#) - Test Driven.NET - SQL Diff - FxCop - SQL Compare - Fiddler - XMLSpy - Reflector - UModel - dotTrace - NHibernate - MindManager Pro - ...