Definitely one for this year’s ‘the horse has bolted‘ award – Microsoft in their wisdom decided to run a Search Engine taste test. The so-called BingItOn campaign looks like it’s finished now (BingItOn links all redirect back to Bing – with 302s no less) but not before Microsoft managed to announce the amazing result that people prefer Bing results 2 to 1 over...
In a perhaps unsurprising move, Microsoft has chosen this Sunday to announce their latest .NET language: Db.NET The release comes a day prior to the lang.next conference commencing in Seattle on Monday. Dubbed as vNext.NET the language features a number of key enhancements including the new Ostinato Framework, Morendo Garbage Collection systems and Cantando Installer. Read more about Db...
It’s always interesting to see how other people do things. Which is why I really like this video of the Microsoft TFS Agile team doing a daily stand-up. Adam Cogan was able to shoot a quick video with the team whilst visiting them recently. There’s a short version and a long version (embedded below) based on his rules about daily stand-ups. It’s worth watching the full 12 minute...
Seriously, how would businesses survive if it weren’t for Excel? :-) Excel is perfect for analysing analytics data in a variety of ways (eg using Pivot tables and Conditional formatting) and it keeps getting better. I’m loving Office 2010 and Excel 2010 in particular – it’s just beautiful to use. In this post I want to highlight one of the ‘tiny’ new things in Excel 2010 that I...
As far as well-priced technical conferences go, I think the Australian SharePoint Conference is pretty impressive. It’s $650 + GST for two days, with three tracks, held at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney. The speaker line-up ‘aint shabby either. [Note: There’s also a few extras for attendees but I wouldn’t get too excited about them (eg attendees all get a SharePoint Server 2010 hosted site...
Google’s patent awarded last week for using location in advertising is interesting news (patent details here via VentureBeat). Not because of the dramatic effect (dun, dun, dah) it might have on the industry . No, the key point here is they submitted the patent for consideration back in September 2003. This is significant because it shows the foresight Google has. Sure, the concept of location...
What larks! I wonder what metrics Microsoft uses to calculate the benefit of a new feature. Take the new battery notifications messages added in Windows 7 for example. On paper, and during testing, that must have seemed like a useful feature to have in the product – it certainly seems useful to me. Instead, when the feature actually worked as it was supposed to it turned out to be a mini PR...
If you are interested in knowing a little more about the IIS SEO Toolkit (I give it the big thumbs up), I’ve written a little review over on my XEN SEO blog (note I originally wrote the review based on the beta version, but it has been updated based on the release in mid Jan). Plus, as mentioned in my previous post, I also discussed the SEO Toolkit with Andrew and Michael on Frankly Speaking...
A big thank you to Andrew Coates and Michael Kordahi for having me on their Frankly Speaking podcast to chat about SEO. You can listen to it here. Frankly Speaking (for those who aren’t yet familiar with it) is an Australian Tech podcast (or perhaps even an Australian Microsoft podcast) and listening to it should be on your weekly To-Do list. SEO is a big topic of course so we only scratched...
Apparently February is ‘put the boot into Microsoft’ month. I must have missed the memo. Or perhaps it only got sent to the ex-senior-management@microsoft.com mailing list. In any case it’s been good to see that some have taken the directive to heart. Oh hang on, cancel that – there actually hasn’t been much said by former softies at all. Instead it’s just all the noise of journalists...