... to remove the clock from the page.

Two or three tier deployment at the flick of a switch.

Silverlight (Browser based or Installed application) and/or HTML 5 front ends both developed against the same middle-tier data model & business logic. HTML 5 front-end adapt to different screen sizes. Runs on Android, iPad, Windows RT and Windows. You don't have to fix the hardware spec.

Our next error related thing is to make the error reporting module check for a friendly error message translation by looking for the signature of the error in a translation table. That way if any technical error messages are annoying the user we can quickly but a translation into the data without having to recompile and deploy a new version of the application.

You can't timestamp your code if you don't have an Internet connection.

Delicate adjustment of the placing of controls on forms can be difficult when you're jiggling around.

Fellow passengers/scenery/announcements can be distracting.

If you think it is pointless then you either haven't tried it or you aren't in its target market.

Once you've got to know it you can produce good looking, functional applications in minutes or hours that would take days or weeks with more traditional tools. The applications come with lots of standard features such as "dirty data detection", complex validation and optimistic concurrency resolution with no effort and you can convert from 2-tier to 3-tier or move from in-house to cloud services by ticking one box.

You can also right-click on an item in the solution explorer and choose "View Table Code" or "View Screen Code" for a more "traditional" route into the code editor.

You can customise LightSwitch applications extensively, not only in the look and feel by using different themes and shells but also in the behaviour of the application by writing code or using Custom Controls.

Behind the scenes LightSwitch uses MVVM and EntityFramework so you can use just about any coding methods applicable to those situations.The front-end is Silverlight (or HTML/JavsScript for the new "mobile" clients currently in beta) so you are restricted to that for the most part but server-side application code can be written using the full power of the .NET environment.

(Please excuse the clumsy URL)

http://www.magbooks.com/mag-books/computers-and-apple-technology/the-ultimate-guide-to-windows-phone

(Disclosure: Magbooks are from Denis Publishing - who publish PC Pro for whom I write a monthly column, and I wrote several chapters of the Magbook on Office 2010.)

SBS won't disappear from retail until June 2013 and from OEMs until December 2013. You will still be able to buy SBS 2011 until those dates and, if you buy it with SA, get the upgrade to the separate 2012/2013 full products whenever you want.

If you didn't/don't buy SA then you will have to make alternative arrangements.

To people who are asking "what's wrong with the cloud?" the answers are bandwidth and security. Lots of places can't get the connectivity at reasonable price to make a cloud solution viable. Lots of people would rather their data stayed under their control, on their machines, on their premises.

You should be able to set VS to target the emulator then, when you press F5 to start your phone app with debugging it should start the emulator (if it is not already running) copy your application to the emulator and start it there.

You start Zune the same way as you start any application. It will then probably want to pair with your device when you plug it in.

However, for first debugging of phone apps, use the emulator rather than a physical device. It is easier.

I find I get better results from contact lenses to give me good distance vision and add +1.25 diopter reading glasses when I need to read small or close up text.

Go visit a reputable optician, have a full sight test and tell them what you do for a living and how much of your life is in front of a computer screen.

Don't be shy about rearranging your desk & monitors, pull the monitor closer or push it away, to make life easier and zoom the display in IE, Outlook or Word if you need to. Ctrl+ScrollWheel is your friend. Ctrl+0 to go back to 100% zoom.

ALSO the ALL CAPS menus are very much harder to read. The blog posting made no attempt to justify the ALL CAPS menus. Please can someone on the VS design team tell us the reason - then perhaps we will understand.

Best to backup your data, wipe the partitions and start again

How good a job they do varies and some of the free ones don't cope too well with recent syntax enhancements such as LINQ and lambda expressions.

Try starting here. http://www.developerfusion.com/tools/convert/vb-to-csharp/

I'd be inclined to scrap that database and do it properly. Having columns called "SomethingNumber" one of which is a Guid and the other nvarchar(6) is so seriously screwed up as to be virtually unworkable. It is certainly a huge barrier to understanding and so to the maintainability of code.

If it says its a "number" it should be a number, not a code or a GUID and leave you to guess which one.

Whether this will give the level of sophistication needed in the UI remains to be seen. It may be even more restrictive than the current browser-based Silverlight implementation which is too restrictive for some applications which must target the Out Of Browser Silverlight experience because they need access to the PC file system (for Export to Excel, etc).

However, Microsoft did themsleves no favours at all by saying Silverlight 5 would be the last version without saying AT THE SAME TIME what would replace it and what the migration path would be.

An "app" may "do one thing well" but if you want to do more...

I'll stick to applications, thanks.

The Open Value licence allows you to spread the cost over three years and from year 4 onwards you only pay the SA cost (usually less than half the licence + SA cost) and again spread it over three years.

Smaller, regular known costs are much better than having to suddenly fork out large amounts to get the latest version or getting left behind because you can't afford the next version.