WOW, I was expecting this in a few weeks but Microsoft have just announced that .NET 4.0 will include new versions of WCF and WF , with new stateful and conversational services and significantly improved designers. The new version of WF includes a 10 times performance increase , new flow control models including a …

Two weeks ago I was delighted to be at ReMix in Brighton. On the last day I was asked to be a Judge in the finals of Speaker Idol. The speakers did a great job in entertaining and informing the attendees , taking there own valuable time at the conference to share more information with others. One chap presented on RGB …

I am with a contingent from Black Marble at REMIX UK in Brighton, if you are here say hello. Bill Buxtons keynote is both engaging and inspirational, if you are in the land of design I suggest trying to watch it. b.

While it might sound like a rather dull sequel to a set of “Microsoft does adventure” books, in fact Microsoft has joined the OMG and it is a very significant direction change for Microsoft to make, I have been following and commenting on the OMG’s work since the early 90’s, I really am pleased, as I think it will …

Microsoft has just updated it’s BizTalk Roadmap , the key change in the roadmap is the introduction of BizTalk 2009. BizTalk 2009 replaces the planned 2006r3 release. The 2009 release should be with us early in 2009 with some great features including development in Visual Studio 2008 :), I have summarised the features …

New versions of my favourite Cop(that’s police to you and I) Duo, FxCop and StyleCop are out. FxCop 1.36 is out including but not limited to 200+ bug fixes over Beta2, new globalisation rules (I smell a Guy at work), half the memory requirement. StyleCop 4.3 is out also including great features such as better VS …

I have been consistently impressed by the blog/efforts of the ever lovely Sara Ford. for those of you who do not know who Sara is, she is a SDE/T on the Visual Studio Core team at Microsoft and via her blog provides us time strapped developers with visual studio hints in bit size easy to understand chunks almost …

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is now available on MSDN subscriber downloads. or from Microsoft download. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (exe) Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso) there are a good number of fixes and new features in the service pack (including TR1 for you C++ philes out there) you …

there are some nice themes for Visual Studio 2008 but if you want your own try this online tool to get that colour scheme you have always wanted. b.

When I was at DDS a nice chap asked me if I knew about WPF performance and the answer was no but I did do some digging and just for the record this is what I found , comments welcome. Perf in WPF http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970683.aspx Perf tools for WPF …