Sol 3

Not everyone in the world speaks English. Such a silly thing to say, but if you live in an English-speaking country it's easy to forget that many (most?) people in the world would prefer to do their work in the language of their choice. Microsoft ships documentation in Visual Studio that is human-translated (a huge effort) into 9 major world ...

Remember last week when I mentioned the Microsoft Web Platform Installer? It's an bootstrapper that gets you setup for free web development, all in a single application. It'll setup IIS7, get you Visual Studio, SQL Server, .NET, etc. Cool. And there was much rejoicing (except XP folks, sorry.) Well, the team just released the Web Application ...

Rob beat me to it. Blogging about T4 (the Text Template Transformation Toolkit) had been on my list literally for a year. He and I were singing its praises last night. Hopefully I can add something small to the conversation. What's the story? Well, T4 is a code generator built right into Visual Studio. To be clear, you HAVE THIS NOW on your ...

There were a number of interesting comments from my post on Faster Builds with MSBuild using Parallel Builds and Multicore CPUs. Here's a few good ones, and some answers. First, Is the developer that sits inside of VS all day debugging able to take advantage of the same build performance improvements? Yes, I think. This post is about my ...

Jeff asked the question ''Should All Developers Have Manycore CPUs?'' this week. There are number of things in his post I disagree with. First, ''dual-core CPUs protect you from badly written software'' is just a specious statement as it's the OS's job to protect you, it shouldn't matter how many cores there are. Second, ''In my opinion, ...

More and more I find myself ''skinning and themeing'' my Visual Studio development environment in order to stay frosty. It's surprising how changing your theme (fonts, colors, etc.) can re-energize me when I'm having trouble with some problem or motivation. Here's a gallery of some nice ...

My ninety-third podcast is up. Actually it was up two weeks ago, but I was on leave, so I'm catching up. In this episode, I talk to Jonathan 'Peli' de Halleux and Nikolai Tillmann from Microsoft Research about Pex, a Dynamic Analysis and Test Generator for .NET. Subscribe: ...

My eighty-eighth podcast is up. In this episode, I talk to Mel Sampat of the Windows Mobile team. He's written a desktop Facebook application called OutSync (link on Facebook) that brings your Facebook photos to Outlook and Windows Mobile. We also talk about how you can write your own Facebook apps ...