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Archive for December, 2010

Netduino

Friday, December 31st, 2010

Christmas is finally over and a new year is on its way.  Before you turn off this is not a retrospective of the past year and a list of promises (which will be broken) for the new year.  Instead a note that I’ll probably be relearning some long lost skills, namely basic electronics as Christmas saw a small but welcome present – a Netduino Plus.  My only hope is that I’ll get up to speed quickly enough and don’t burn it out.

All the best for 2011.

Developers Like New Toys

Friday, December 31st, 2010

So it has been a week or so since Visual Studio 2010 was released in the wild and the verdict is that it is a great step forward.  It is amazing how simple things like pinable data tips make your life as a developer a lot easier.

One thing I have found irritating is the fact that you need Sharepoint installed in order to use the reporting facilities in Team Foundation Server (TFS).  This is not so much of a problem in a team environment as you are normally using servers to host TFS but it is a bind in a single developer environment.  For those of you who are not aware, Sharepoint will not install on Vista or Windows 7 running on a 32 bit machine.  This is a problem for me when experimenting as the environment where I test my ideas before implementing them is Windows 7 32-bit.  Looks like I’ll be rebuilding an old 64-bit machine in the near future.  On the up side, it will allow me to look at Sharepoint 2010 which has recently been added to MSDN.  As I say, all developers like new toys :).

Update: 25/04/2010

A recent blog posing by Shai Raiten suggests that Sharepoint can be installed on Windows 7 32-bit.  At the end of the post it suggested that an advanced installation was possible (note the Advanced button is highlighted) but this generated several errors.  I have since read the full article on Bamboo Solutions web site and followed their instructions and I now have WSS3.0 SP1 installed on my laptop.  Now all I have to do is get the reporting services working.

Silverlight 5 Announced

Sunday, December 5th, 2010

The Firestarter event held at the start of this month saw Microsoft announce the future release of Silverlight 5.  A run down of some of the new features can be found here on John Papa’s blog.  There is a also a link to the video of Scott Guthrie’s keynote.