Blog

March was a big month for Virtual Earth, if you missed something here is the VE Wrap Up: Silverlight CTP Released The big news was the release of the Silverlight Virtual Earth control CTP. This is the next generation of … Continued

It’s only 4 weeks till out next Girl Geek Dinner! Girl Geek Guitar Hero Gaming Night This month, Microsoft have kindly lent us their office so we’re going to something a little different: a night of games! There will be … Continued

We’ve been invited back to this year’s Technology Takes You Anywhere event, held on the 6th April. Last year we wore ourselves out showing 100’s of girls how to use an XBox controller to fly around Virtual Earth and find … Continued

This morning we say goodbye to Egypt and head to Singapore on our way home.  Last night we grabbed an old newspaper from the hotel and wrapped up the vase ready for transport home.  Took a picture of it just … Continued

Our last free day in Egypt we were picked up by our awesome driver Moses and ventured out to Dashur and Saqqara to check out the less popular buy by no means less impressive pyramids. First stop was the Red … Continued

After a day back in Cairo we boarded our mini-bus for Sinai in the north-east of the country. Sinai is quite different with more rocky mountains then down south, the roads were all sealed and our driver set speed records … Continued

Located very close to Luxor is the massive ruins of Karnak. This was tourist central with a bottle of Gatorade for sale, 40 pounds ($13), in the searing heat. The main temple was impressive, the highlight being the obelix. They … Continued

A 4am start today in Luxor as I headed out to the west bank to board a hot air balloon. A dawn lift off, perfect morning with very little wind. It was my first trip in a balloon and was … Continued

This morning we dismantle our toilet and set sail for the other side of the river.  On our way to Luxor we stop at Edfu temple.  This was supposed to be a hidden gem that not a lot of tourists … Continued

After a great breakfast we say goodbye to our hosts as today we spend the whole day and night on the felucca.  I get comfy with my iPod and listen to some tunes and doze off while we sail up … Continued

We have a leisurely morning before our trip on the felucca. We wander back to the markets in search of some bread for breakfast where we find a bakery.  We’re quickly dragged inside and shown through the bakery and how … Continued

A bunch of our group are up at 3am to join the armed convoy to Abu Simbel. We get to sleep in a little as we’re getting picked up at 7:30 for our 9am flight. We arrive a the airport … Continued

We arrive in Aswan in the morning and grab our hotels before wandering through the markets and surrounding streets for a few hours.  The markets are quite long with lots of vendors trying to get you into their “hassle free” … Continued

This morning we head off to the Pyramids and it’s quite fascinating how close they are to all the buildings in town.  They still tower over many of the buildings  and are an awe inspiring site from the road. We’re … Continued

We got up early at the Windsor Palace Hotel to find they had hotwater..YAY. We have breakfast on the roof level of the hotel which has a spectacular view of the water and city. We then grabbed a cab out … Continued

I got up early for our trip to Alexandria only to find there was no hot water at the Victoria Hotel…not a good start to the day. Then we wandered down the road to the train station hoping to get … Continued

After a good sleep-in and a leisurely morning we headed to the airport for the next leg of our journey – Egypt.  This consisted of 2 flights: DC->Frankfurt and Frankfurt->Cairo on Lufthansa. The first was quite painful as there was … Continued

Today we ventured out to the Air and Space Museum near the Dulles International Airport. They have an amazing selection of planes, helicopters and even space craft like the Endeavour. They also had a Concorde from Air France. Such a … Continued

Now that the summit is over we’ve moved onto Washington DC. Today we wandered up the mall taking pictures of all the monuments. Unfortunately none of the water features are turned on and no tripods are allowed. So we got … Continued

Day 1 of the summit was very relaxed, we were able to sleep in and adjust a little better to the time zone. The first session of the day was Steve Marx (@smarx) and Azure, fantastic to see all he … Continued

24 hours of travel and here we are in Seattle. It is never fun to travel 15,000 KM but this trip was actually quite good. We flew Air New Zealand, a 777-200 from Brisbane to Auckland which was very rooming … Continued

Last night a bunch of new and returning faces turned up to the Lock ‘n’ Load Bistro at West End to watch Jessica Coates present at our 4th Brisbane Girl Geek Dinner.  Jessica suggested the venue for this month’s event … Continued

I noticed on Tim Warr’s Blog that there’s a Virtual Earth Developer Event happening in Reading on the 19th March. We were fortunate to have one of these events in Brisbane last year and it was certainly a worthwhile event.  … Continued

In less then a week thousands of Microsoft Most Valued Professionals will descend upon Seattle, Washington for the 2009 MVP Summit. It is a week of in depth interactions with the product groups at Microsoft and a highlight of our … Continued

We mentioned this to those at our Azure presentation this week, but I think it’s worthy of a blog post.  When I first started playing with Azure in preparation for our talk, I made the classic Hello Cloud project, deployed … Continued

This week we’ve been fortunate to have been invited to present at the Politics & Technology Forum: Campaigning Online Event on Thursday 26th February in Canberra. Event details: Join government, business leaders and political bloggers at the second annual Microsoft … Continued

There’s a couple of Virtual Earth Webcasts coming up how a quality mapping system can help boost profitability delivered by Technical Evangelist, Chris Pendleton:   Wednesday, February 18, 2009 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) or February 19, 2009 … Continued

  Last night we presented a session called – Windows Azure – A developer’s introduction to coding in the cloud at the Queensland MSDN User Group in Brisbane.  We had a great turnout of around 60 people. It’s always good … Continued

This one catches out every developer when they start coding in JavaScript. The issue is that you can’t change the DOM in IE before it has fully loaded. Usually everything is fine locally and in Firefox but when you deploy … Continued

So you have built yourself an Azure worker process to crunch through your work, but how do you keep an eye on things? Facing that question I investigated and then built the world’s first Vista / Win7 Gadget to monitor … Continued