Survived my first week at nsquared. Initial signs are good :-) Rather than prattle on about how awesome my new employer is, how we’re going to take over the world, how I’m the working with an exceptional team etc, etc, I thought I’d share a few insights into the company. nsquared is a startup (I’ve never worked for a startup before) and as such it’s going through changes quickly...
Another brain expanding day! I was so impressed with the event that I checked my impressions with a few other attendees – I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just a case of me being so naive about this stuff, that any new information was a revelation :-) But no, there were many others in the same boat. Day 2 was a little different. Where as yesterday focussed on what is possible now (with all the...
I attended day 1 of the Live Services Jumpstart today. Fortuitously this was also my first day working for nsquared (I’d coincidentally registered for the event separate to organising my start date). I haven’t really been following the Live Services side of Microsoft of late, so today was a real eye opener. Although I was aware of many of the Live Services, it wasn’t until we drilled into...
As the SkyDrive team announced yesterday, the online storage capacity has been increased to 25GB (from 5GB). At least we know there’s some benefit coming out of all those containers :-) As the team mentioned (but Life Hacker did a much better job of explaining), there’s also a bunch of new features, including the ability to download entire folders as Zip files. I’ve had problems accessing...
I’m always intrigued when some development companies claim they can’t afford to pay the software licenses for the tools they use. That is, after agreeing to pay salaries, rent, office fit-outs, hardware and other expenses they somehow can’t stump up the cash for operating system licenses and proper developer tools. The usual recourse is to either ‘bend the rules of licensing’ or pursue...
Microsoft has definitely turned around. PDC was the proof that the company is back on track. Not that it was necessarily off track – since they’ve been working on it for the last 3 years – but the lack of communication certainly wasn’t inspiring anyone. What exactly has caused this transformation? Answer: Ray Ozzie. Less than a year ago (just after the MVP Summit) I was gravely...
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...
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...
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...
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...