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Why I don’t read newspapers

I don’t usually read the papers. Or even keep up with current affairs. In general I’m pretty out of touch with what’s going on in the world. But yesterday I bought the weekend papers. I’m on holidays, and thought it’d be nice to catch up on world events. What a mistake! Nothing but page after page of depressing economic, political and social doom and gloom. As I read the articles I...

PERSONAL: Holidays

I finished up at Elcom yesterday. I’m on a week’s break, before I start my next role at nsquared on 8 Dec. So, what will I do for the week? Well, no plans to go anywhere – I’ll be staying right here at home, relaxing and catching up on things. Here’s a few of the ‘chores’ I’ve got planned: Get a massage – it’s been ages since I had a massage (DONE: 29/11/08) Tax returns...

Microsoft advertising spend: $1.2B

It’s easy to be impressed (or horrified) by big numbers, and 1.2 billion is certainly a big number when it comes to dollars. That’s what Microsoft spent on advertising last year. Apple by contrast spent $486M (as Lindsay Blakely reported). But forget the actual dollars, instead focus on percentages. As Todd Bishop helpfully points out in his excellent analysis, Microsoft spend between 2% and...

Do more with this Ad

I spotted this gem on MSDN tonight (yeah, slow night…). Above the annoying flashing ad was a link titled ‘Do more with this Ad’. You got me. I clicked it. Amazing, they’re after my feedback. They care about me. My opinion counts. I submitted my response, refreshed the page and waited expectantly for the refreshing change it would bring to my browsing experience. Can you guess what...

VSTO in Visual Studio 2010

One of the biggest hurdles with VSTO is deployment. As you probably know, the pre-requisites for running a VSTO app (even of the simplest Hello World variety) include: .NET Framework 3.5 Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) VSTO Runtime (Plus Office of course) Now, packaging these isn’t the issue, since the Visual Studio team have worked hard to make the ClickOnce process a simple and seamless...

Office 14 for the web

One of the announcements at PDC was about Microsoft’s foray into the web based Office space. This was met with initial excitement, and seems to be answer to the (small I suspect) group of people wondering how Microsoft can compete with Google Docs, Zoho and other online offerings. The demo here, with Antoine Leblond and Chris Bryant is a nice indication of how it will operate. I’ve been a...

VSTO for VBA developers

Last weekend I presented at Office DevCon on the topic of VSTO for VBA developers. This is an interesting use case because you essentially have a group of very experienced, highly productive developers, all extremely familiar with their technology. So my aim was to look at how Microsoft is supporting this community (as opposed to say pushing them into a new technology). I chatted about this...

VSTO on stackoverflow

I don’t know if you’ve been spending much time on stackoverflow lately, but if you are you’ll know it’s a kind of addictive experience. There’s all types of developer questions on there. The tagging structure is neat and allows you to easily keep track of certain topics. There’s a growing list of VSTO related questions there, so along with the MSDN VSTO forums you are pretty likely to...

Office Development with VS Dev Center – the home of VSTO

Thanks to Beth Massi for alerting us to this – the Office Development with Visual Studio Developer Center has been launched. This is where the URL will now take you to. [This isn’t to be confused with the Office Developer Center (another excellent resource by the way), since that is open to all office development (not just Visual Studio based).] The Office Development with Visual Studio...

Wish item: PDC viewer

One thing I’d like is a special PDC videos viewer. Currently I’m watching most of the videos via Channel 9, and the experience is quite nice. I also have a number of sessions downloaded (and a big thanks to Justin King for saving me tons of bandwidth by burning me a DVD of all his downloads). But in general the experience is so… Web 1.0, and here’s the user experience I’d really like:...

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