How's this for hypocrisy: Mozilla says that Apple banning Firefox from iPads and iPhones is no problem, but Microsoft restricting the browser from using some features on some Windows 8 tablets may be illegal.

In this second installment of the useful abstractions, I discuss the WindowBuilder.

Roger Jennings continues to keep us updated on a cool ongoing Azure Table Services project.

There where many good ideas and your truly suggested using PostSharp – mainly because this is one of the examples I use in my AOP and PostSharp presentation. And so without further ado here is my solution for your consideration:

Can you remember the last time you tried to search your code base for a relevant method or code snippet? I can, and it was a disaster. I used Visual Studio’s “Find in Files”, which returned 100s of results. After reviewing about twenty of them I gave up and started surfing the Solution Explorer, opening files one-by-one. After about 20 minutes of reading source files I began to wonder if there was a better way...

On Friday last week I delivered a webcast on the new LightSwitch features in Visual Studio 11 beta. I think it went pretty well considering it was the first time I had done the session end-to-end :-). You can now view the on-demand webcast here:

In this episode, we are joined by Abhishek Lal — Senior Program Manager for Windows Azure Service Bus — who shows us some enhancements to the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8. Abhishek discusses how developers can use service bus to handle a variety of messaging patterns and how those patterns can be used to build great Windows 8 Metro Apps.

If you are a project manager or a program manager, or aspiring to be, one of the best project management tools you can add to your toolbox is the Kanban. In fact, if somebody were to ask me, what’s the single best way to exponentially improve project execution, I would probably say, the answer is Kanban. (Well, I might first say, get my book, Getting Results the Agile Way, and adopt Agile Results

This week we look at how to hire a good mobile programmer, a round up of Big Data vendors and a new semantic search tool.

The challenge is to take the raw compass heading data, and smooth it out over time so the UI element this data is bound to (such as an arrow) won't be jittery. You can see this jitter in the SDK example for the Compass: the CurrentValueChanged event handler is fired every 20ms and jitters within the error margin for the hardware. Our task is to smooth out these data readings for a more pleasant user interface. And to make it fun, we'll be using Reactive Extensions.

This post provides both a useful walkthrough and useful links for the Java developer who is interested in trying out Microsoft's cloud service.

The issue that has held Windows Phone back the most thus far from reaching success is an important part of a smartphone many may take for granted: apps. While the Marketplace is nearing its first 100,000 apps and the quality has so far managed to hold its own, the only platform with native Xbox Live integration still can't definitively say it's 'the best platform for gaming' simply because they don't have the same arms race of innovation, graphics or gameplay mechanics as other platforms like iOS and Android.