Category: Microsoft

  • My 45 Days With Win Phone 7, and the Move Back to iPhone

    A while back, I bought a Windows Phone 7, specifically an HTC 7 Surround. I bought it used via ebay (for under $150), so as to not have it count as my contract subsidized phone. It was not an unlocked phone, and I was able to switch my SIM card from my main phone (an […]

  • On a Feeling of Ownership, and How it Changes With Size

    Through the years, a fair amount of my projects have been with small companies and startups. One thing I notice almost universally, is that members of smaller teams tend to have hunger for success, and a real feeling of ownership over their product. They take personal pride and consider themselves invested in the project. That […]

  • New Questions the Build Conference Causes

    Build answered a lot of questions for developers who wondered about the future of the Microsoft platform. WinRT is the new API for “Metro ” applications, which are streamlined enable both tablet and pc inputs. These applications can be built in .Net or native C++ using XAML, or in JavaScript with Html5. The traditional desktop […]

  • On Outsourcing, Protectionism and Education

    Things are often more complicated than they seem. Certainly in the worlds of economics and nationalism. It’s no wonder that as the largest economy in the world, America wants to protect that place and Americans are sensitive to any efforts to move jobs elsewhere. Certainly that is true today, with unemployment currently at 9.1%. In […]

  • Safely Using an Insecure SA Development Account

    As a consultant, I’m sometimes a part of projects that do things I wouldn’t choose to do. Welcome to the real world, right? For example, on one project I worked on in the past, the connection string for an asp.net project used the “sa” account for sql server. Further, it was in the web.config file […]