As good technical people may tell you, a decent set of headphones can be the difference between a productive day and a really productive day behind the keyboard. Being able to zone into the task at hand is made so much easier by an immersive sound, and excellent acoustics. Over […]
Why hello gamers! Just had to write about these, frankly, awesome headsets which have just been released today. A friend and I have been waiting anxiously for over a month since we put our pre-orders in with EB Games last month at the Sydney gaming exhibition at Olympic Park. We […]
As the BUILD conference (formerly PDC) kicks off in Redmond, we are finally treated to the official launch of the long, long awaited Windows Phone 8 SDK. Held under wraps for months, with precious few copies of the pre-release being seen, this SDK has been a long time coming. The […]
As you my or may not know, Microsoft has been touting its long awaited answer to the Apple iPad – the Microsoft Surface – for some time now. This is Microsoft branded, Microsoft-built hardware which will come in two distinct flavours being a version running Windows 8 RT (on an […]
Intro Long before Microsoft .NET 4.5 was a reality, in the days when asynch programming was not a given, I developed a bit of a concurrency wrapper implementation which has been used on a variety of projects. At the threat of being redundant (in light of the across-the-board support for […]
Overview The recently released Windows 8 operating system contained support for an interesting approach to running your operating system – off an external bootable device. This article will show you how to boot your operating system using an external USB drive. If you’re not sure what Windows To Go is […]
Hello Internet, This afternoon (Sunday, 30 September) at around 3pm I lost a black sunglass slip case containing my prescription spectacles somewhere between the Old Bus Depot Markets in Kingston (Wentworth avenue) and Kingston shops (Giles st and Green Square) in Canberra, ACT. The glasses in question are Ted Baker […]
Last night Microsoft’s TechEd conference kicked off the annual delegate event, this year titled ‘Hyped’. The venue was, incidentally, at the convention centre; a slightly disappointing change from MovieWorld in 2007. As we were leaving the centre after our last session of the day, we couldn’t help but notice the […]
Lock note has begun. Frank’s back and is warming up the crowd. A few stats about the backbone of TechEd… Some big numbers in those stats…12,000ms of cable! 2.2 TBs of data, tracked! No pr0n… Frank introduced me to Twitter, speaking of… 5 days to install and 7 hours to […]
You can count on one of three things failing: hardware, software, or people. One of the most important considerations when moving applications into the public cloud is how to plan for – and mitigate – these failures. Certainly there are best practices in building any application that help you to […]
Most developers are familiar with the concept of scaling out their application tier; with SQL Azure Federations it is now possible to scale out the data tier as well. In this session we will deep dive on building large scale solutions on SQL Azure. In this session we will cover […]
“Casablanca is a Microsoft incubation effort to support cloud-based client-server communication in native code using a modern asynchronous C++ API design. Think of it as Node.js, but using C++. Casablanca gives you the power to use existing native C++ libraries and code to do awesome things on the server. Come […]
Follow me on Twitter @ausrob maybe? At 12:30pm today, with green band on my arm (and extra swag in the conference bag), a group of helicopter flight winners made our way to the side of the convention building to await the promised chopper. We were split into groups of five, […]
This session will present extensions to the Azure StockTrader application to run on mobile devices including Windows Phone, IPhone, and Android devices. The sample application includes a backend powered by the Windows Azure Service Bus and SQL Azure with Federations to enable data display and user interface to be optimized […]
So, you’re building apps that span multiple devices and you’re curious about what the cloud can offer. Is it possible to deploy scalable web apps and services on Windows Azure? How about storing data in the cloud? Is it possible to use the cloud for push notifications to the device? […]