Hi, I’m Craig Bailey and this is my personal blog where I write about technology, business systems, HubSpot, marketing strategy and general life experiences. You can read my posts here.
I’m involved with two agencies in Sydney:
I also co-host HubShots, the podcast and YouTube show focussed on getting the most out of HubSpot. We are the creators of the HubShots Framework.
It’s easy to be impressed (or horrified) by big numbers, and 1.2 billion is certainly a big number when it comes to dollars. That’s what Microsoft spent on advertising last year. Apple by contrast spent $486M (as Lindsay Blakely reported). But forget the actual dollars, instead focus on percentages. As Todd Bishop helpfully points out in his excellent analysis, Microsoft spend between 2% and...
I spotted this gem on MSDN tonight (yeah, slow night…). Above the annoying flashing ad was a link titled ‘Do more with this Ad’. You got me. I clicked it. Amazing, they’re after my feedback. They care about me. My opinion counts. I submitted my response, refreshed the page and waited expectantly for the refreshing change it would bring to my browsing experience. Can you guess what...
One of the biggest hurdles with VSTO is deployment. As you probably know, the pre-requisites for running a VSTO app (even of the simplest Hello World variety) include: .NET Framework 3.5 Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) VSTO Runtime (Plus Office of course) Now, packaging these isn’t the issue, since the Visual Studio team have worked hard to make the ClickOnce process a simple and seamless...
One of the announcements at PDC was about Microsoft’s foray into the web based Office space. This was met with initial excitement, and seems to be answer to the (small I suspect) group of people wondering how Microsoft can compete with Google Docs, Zoho and other online offerings. The demo here, with Antoine Leblond and Chris Bryant is a nice indication of how it will operate. I’ve been a...
Last weekend I presented at Office DevCon on the topic of VSTO for VBA developers. This is an interesting use case because you essentially have a group of very experienced, highly productive developers, all extremely familiar with their technology. So my aim was to look at how Microsoft is supporting this community (as opposed to say pushing them into a new technology). I chatted about this...
I don’t know if you’ve been spending much time on stackoverflow lately, but if you are you’ll know it’s a kind of addictive experience. There’s all types of developer questions on there. The tagging structure is neat and allows you to easily keep track of certain topics. There’s a growing list of VSTO related questions there, so along with the MSDN VSTO forums you are pretty likely to...
Thanks to Beth Massi for alerting us to this – the Office Development with Visual Studio Developer Center has been launched. This is where the URL will now take you to. [This isn’t to be confused with the Office Developer Center (another excellent resource by the way), since that is open to all office development (not just Visual Studio based).] The Office Development with Visual Studio...
One thing I’d like is a special PDC videos viewer. Currently I’m watching most of the videos via Channel 9, and the experience is quite nice. I also have a number of sessions downloaded (and a big thanks to Justin King for saving me tons of bandwidth by burning me a DVD of all his downloads). But in general the experience is so… Web 1.0, and here’s the user experience I’d really like:...
There’s only a few spots left for the Live Services Jumpstart in Sydney. It’s an intensive technical training session on Microsoft’s consumer web platform technologies. It’s being run by James McCutcheon and Dr Neil Roodyn (two of my new work colleagues at nsquared) and covers more than 20 technical sessions, hands-on labs and the opportunity to chat with numerous Live Services dudes...
I’ve seen a few posts about this lately (eg Kordsi, Coatsy, Jordsy, sorry couldn’t resistsy), and with good reason – it looks like a really exciting new user group (or ‘network’ to be more correct). Here’s the Silverlight Designer and Developer Network (SDDN) website, which tells you their first meeting is next Thursday 27 Nov (held at Microsoft in Melbourne) kicking off around 5:30pm...