Last week Neil Armstrong passed away. He was part of an era in which innovation truly thrived. Profoundly back in 1969 he said “ That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” . The space race drove innovation and invention. There were so many spin-offs, especially in technology. Fast forward more than forty years later, we have a jury of nine, ruling pinch to zoom, and icons in a grid are the invention of Apple. Sad. What a sad sad week  for mankind.

Recently Nokia rolled out a couple of updates for Lumia owners including an OS update that provides tethering support for Lumia 800’s, and some cool camera extras that provides a great group photo merge.  Nokia also released a “ Contacts Share ” application that provides vcard support for sharing contacts. Install Nokia’s Contact Share , and next time someone sends you a vcard attachment you can simply open it and select to add it to your contacts. There’s other contacting sharing apps out there

In the Office 2013 preview, Outlook doesn’t automatically setup @Live email accounts.  I’m guessing this is just an oversight in the preview. To work around this you need to set up the account manually and specify the server as m.hotmail.com In the Add Account screen select “Manual ....   In the next screen select Exchange ActiveSync :   Next when adding your account information, specify the server as m.hotmail.com   Enjoy.

Yesterday’s announcement of Windows Phone 8 not being an upgrade for the latest Nokia phones, including Lumia 800, 900 et al, has been met understandably with both disappointment and anger from many existing handset owners. I’ve also seen some articles/comments that suggest it is needed for the greater good ; articles which clearly missed what WP8 potentially brings, and clearly missed the point that existing handset owners clearly like what WP8 has to offer: hence their angst. First of, the question

My first impressions of the windows 8 mail application ... Accounts : The mail app seemed to work straight away with my @live account, and looks like it will offer good synchronisation with multiple accounts however I am unable to get the “accounts” charm to stay open when running in a VMWare VM, so haven’t tested multiple accounts. The @Live account seemed to cause synchronisation issues for Outlook on another machine which was only resolved by deleting the local ost file. Likes: Live tiles indicating

The North American TechEd videos are online now. The keynote from Day 2 is about Windows 8 and is worth watching. Actually, whilst watching the day 2 keynote see if you can count the times “actually” is used, actually        I guess it’s better than “So...” Biggest moment of irony in the video is when the desktop is demo’ed with windows docked to 50% of the screen. It’s a real pity you can’t window a Windows RT app to do the same.

The LightSwitch team announced that LightSwitch will render to HTML5 + javascript. This is huge in expanding and liberating the client requirements including mobile devices !! see the LightSwitch team blog for more details ..

Scott Hanselman posted about VB6 and showed a snippet of code : Public Function Fib(ByVal n As Integer) As Integer Fib = IIf (n < 2, n, Fib(n-1) + Fib(n-2)) End Function What Scott probably didn’t realize that the IIF function in VB (both VB6 and later) is a Function not an operator. That means all arguments passed to the function are evaluated. Can you see the adverse side effect Scott’s code would have ? NB. In VB.NET if you wrote the same code as Scott posted, and you have Strict

The software a phone runs is important but the hardware is even more so. My current day to day phone is the Lumia 800, and the previous one was a HTC mozart. To me the difference is massive. The lumia has a much better display, better reception (which is really important to me), and better battery life. Like I said the difference is massive to *me*. So whilst thinking/talking hardware, here’s some of the updates I’d like to see: No more charge cables !  I’m sick of plugging in my phone to charge

The following is my response to the VS blog post about the design for all caps in top level menus: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-design-with-all-caps.aspx First off, why would you want to add *EMPHASIS* to menus when the design philosophy stated for the new look of VS was it didn't distract from the content we are creating? Second, the examples provided of Bing, Azure portal and Zune are complete mismatches. Bing doesn't add top level menus in ALL CAPS, quite the