Compact Framework

If you are reading this...

Nick — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 21:47:00 GMT

Then you are missing out on content on my new blog!

The new blog url is:

http://sharepointnick.com/blog/default.aspx

And the new RSS feed you need to subscribe to is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/sharepointnick

See you on the other side!

SharePointNick.com

Nick — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 20:55:00 GMT

www.sharepointnick.com

This will be the new site very soon!

Make sure you are using the feedburner RSS feed and the move will be painless for you! Here it is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Vb-techWeblog

There's some 600 people that aren't using this so you better all update it now!

Laptop stolen

Nick — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 22:15:00 GMT

unfortunately I had my laptop stolen tonight.

If anybody see's any dodgy posts i apologies.

Orange SVP C600

Nick — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 22:30:00 GMT

Upgrade my old SVP C500 to a brand spanking new Orange SVP C600. It’s very nice with a much improved resolution on the screen. Not sure about all the new features though to be honest as I’ve hardly had the time to look into the manual yet. It’s running Windows Mobile 5.0 so I thought great, lets do some SmartPhone development for it. Porting over Pocket Blogger to the smartphone will be a breeze I thought except I can’t get any of the webservice calls to work. I’m not sure whether it’s the webservice call that’s failing itself (I’ve read some places that you need to use an IP address rather than a domain name), or if the phone is failing to connect to the net at all! Any .NET SmartPhone developer gurus out there want to help me!? I gave up to be honest before I really started looking into it.

What we are going to get up running though at work is Exchange 2003 SP2 and the push emails to Mobile 5.0 devices. I’ll let you know how that all goes. From the blurb from Microsoft it should be as easy as anything, but you always know that probably isn’t the case!

Mix06 - round up

Nick — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 11:53:00 GMT

As you can probably tell from the title Tim and I are on the plane on our way back to Gatwick. After the first update of day ones activities, posting a blog entry after getting back to the hotel has been the last thing on my mind. Getting some sleep has been the first! I now know why a lot of people say these conferences are hard work. 15 hour days of presentations and the networking opportunities in the evening is tough going. That’s not to say I won’t be wanting to go to the next one that I’m given the chance to attend!

A lot of other people have been doing a great job of blogging about the event anyway, one of them being Chris Green the technical editor from Computing magazine. He interviewed Tim and I on Tuesday evening about what we did, what we thought of the conference and topics and the direction Microsoft are going in with the Live platform, Atlas, and Vista. It was pretty nerve wracking being interviewed. Chris didn’t say whether he’d use it completely unedited, or even at all, but if it does go up I’ll post a link to it.

One of the nicest guys we met, and who we hung around with nearly all conference was Omar Al Zabir (you gotta check out his cool site). He runs his own consultancy business and also the site Page Flakes. Tim met him on the plane between Newark and Las Vegas, and luckily we met up again during the first session on Monday. He’s written some great msdn articles and some cool open source applications. Hearing him talk about the application code he’s made available I’ve decided to put up the code I wrote for Pocket Blogger. Although nowhere near the standard of Omars projects someone may decide to use it or extend the application further. I sure hope so as there were lots of things I meant to do with the project but have never taken on, one of which being a port to use on a smart phone. I’ll get the code sorted over the weekend and posted up somewhere.

As I previously mentioned meeting Alex Barnett was cool (he’s got a pic of me on his blog!). It was a little weird though as we kept going to exactly the same sessions. I had to reassure him that I wasn’t following him and we must just be interested in the same things! I also got to show him the work I’ve been doing around attention data and he was pretty impressed. Also demo’d to Marc Canter and Kim Cameron. They were also both impressed and although I’d love to tell you a little more about it now, all will be revealed in due course! The fact that these three guys were excited about what we’re doing though is a very good sign. I was a bit nervous about meeting all these people whose blogs I’ve been reading for ages but once you start talking to them you realise they are human, friendly, and most of all like talking to people who are interested in the same things they are.

Other sessions to note were all the ones on Infocard, and the one on running your content driven website on SharePoint 2007. I thought the SharePoint session would be empty, but it was very well attended and I was very impressed that it was the session that had the most question from the audience. I guess this is because all the server components for Office 2007 have been under NDA and this is the first chance many have got to see them, but it was still good to see. With more info being made public about SharePoint 2007 now I should hopefully be able to blog about my experiences of using it and developing against it. I got up and asked a quick question about licencing for public facing SharePoint sites but unfortunately Jackie Bodine didn’t know the answer. It also gave me a chance to mention the SharePoint User Group UK to the audience for anyone based over in Britain. I managed to link to that site in nearly everyone of my blog posts!

The final mention of sessions I’ll give to was the Microsoft Research one. I went here not expecting much, but in the end was completely blown away. The imaging work the MS is doing, and social software is amazing. Going to get back to the UK and check out the Research site as there are lots of things to download and try out. Brian Mistele from Inrix spoke about Microsofts traffic technology that they have licenced and built a product around which was of particular interest to us after we did the mashup with the BBC traffic data and Local.Live.com.

Mix06 finished on Wednesday lunch time which gave Tim, Omar and myself a chance to drive around Las Vegas. We got on a straight road and drove until the road finished in a new housing development. We felt like we were very close to the mountains and could walk to them in about 5 minutes although in reality they were still miles away. On the drive back we stopped off at CompUSA to see if we could buy a cheap Tablet PC. Tims keen to get one, and I could have been persuaded, but unfortunately they only had a HP version that wasn’t powerful enough to do any development work on. According to a Tablet PC user I spoke to at the conference most US users purchase their online, which it looks like we’ll have to do back in the UK. If anybody spots any bargains out there please let us know! We saw a sony viao that was so cheap and such good specs that Tim nearly bought it, we needed to remind ourselves though that it was a Tablet PC we were after!

In terms of networking at Mix06 I think the event for us was a great success. We’ve got a stack of business cards to follow up on. If anybody from Mix06 is over in the UK anytime make sure you look us up. We’ll be happy to give you a tour of Windsor and show you the cool kinds of things we are working on.

Longest blog post ever……you can tell I’m on a plane with nothing else to do!

Final update : back home now and trying to get back to UK time zone!

Technorati Tags : Mix06 Las Vegas Microsoft Vista Atlas SharePoint Tablet PC

Windows Live Local

Nick — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 08:52:00 GMT

Been reading on a few Microsoft blogs that Virual Earth has been renamed and a new version released. It's not called Windows Live Local. I think Virtual Earth was better to be honest. Anyway, they've now got detailed mapping information for Europe and more importantly the UK. All we need now is the BBC to finish the PostCode API project and the UK can hopefully get some cool mapping applications.

DDD 2 on Saturday

Nick — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 20:58:00 GMT

I’ll be at Developer Developer Developer Day 2 on Saturday. Make sure you say hello if you’ve ever visited here (by mistake or on purpose!).

I’ll be at the geek dinner in the evening as well.

Should be great fun, I’m really looking forward to it!

DDD2 agenda announced

Nick — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 20:21:00 GMT

http://www.developerday.co.uk/ddd/agendaddd2.asp

It’s so annoying! So many great presentations but you can only see 1 each session.

developer inspiration

Nick — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 12:19:00 GMT

Looking for some inspiration for your next ‘pet project’? Get over to Channel 9 and take a look at the ShowOff section. Developers were asked to submit their projects for show at the PDC. There’s some pretty wicked stuff there and I’ve only watched a couple so far!

I particuarly love cfWorldWind. I didn’t realise that Mobile 5.0 was going to have Managed Direct3D Mobile in it. Time for some cracking games for Pocket PC’s. Who needs a PSP? Anybody fancy working on a port of Doom2 for Pocket PC?

I love VB as well!

Nick — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 22:18:00 GMT

After reading Dave Olivers post I thought I too should confess my love for VB(.net). I had a brief affair with C#, and do revisit it quite a bit, but if I had a choice about what language to use it’d definitely be VB!