So, the keynote was interesting. Much of the content I had seen before, but there were some demos that were interesting and a few snippets that made me take note.

For example, I had not understood that the acquisition of Kidaro will enable interaction between applications running within a virtual machine and the host …

It's an exercise in surreality. I've just walked through tunnels reminiscent of THX1138, to emerge in a wonderful blue-bathed auditorium, and they're playing the Akira soundtrack (specifically the bit from just after the first nuclear explosion). Weird.

Andy and I travelled all the way from Bradford, and the first guy …

Having just returned from PDC in LA, here are my highlights from the week.

Windows Azure - this is the OS for the cloud. Microsoft have learnt from their experiences and created a secure, scalable platform for developing and deploying your web applications.

.Net Services - Are a set of services hosted in the cloud to …

It's 7:25 AM. Andy and I are hoping to make a whistle-stop trip to the Cathedral before making it to the conference early enough to get good seats for the keynote.

I thought I'd take a picture of the conference pack, especially since I've heard grumblings about the PDC bag. The TechEd pack looks pretty much identical …

A new version of the Application Architecture Guide ( v2.0 ) has been released to beta.

Part I, Fundamentals of Application Architecture
Part II, Design
Part III, Layers
Part IV, Quality Attributes
Part V, Archetypes - Design and Patterns

Get it Here.

b.

Ola! Andy and I are now in sunny Espana. Only it's not sunny. Oh well... However, true to form we started our trip, having registered at the conference centre, by eating hot dogs in a german fast food joint in a Spanish shopping centre! If you're passing, Kurz & Gut does pretty good food.

I'm also extremely …

Developer Express and Microsoft now are shipping a limited free copy version of CodeRush and Refactor! Pro. The free edition is available for C# developers using Visual Studio 2008.

A list of features :

• Find any File or Symbol...
• Tab to Next Reference
• Expand/Shrink Selection
• Intelligent Declaration Based on Usage …

I am just back from the PDC and all the great news ( post to follow ) and I am just off to TechED IT all though Rik seems to have forgotten me :(

if you are at TechED IT pop over to the BizTalk booth and say hello.

b.

The P&P team have released the Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance Guidance book. The guide is designed to help groups meet customers expectations of delivery.

• How to Plan for Acceptance Testing
• What Kinds of Acceptance Tests to Run
• How to Create and Run Acceptance Tests
• Defining What “Done” Means ( this is the …