Just over three years ago I packed up my Guernsey life to come and work for Microsoft in Washington. I thought it might be fun to share some things I’ve learnt. This one is about transport.

Be prepared for cross-referenced questions and mandatory fingerprinting to make you feel like a replicant even though you’ve done nothing wrong and your eyes don’t glow in the dark. The gatekeepers at immigration are all-powerful and take their job seriously so you should too as I found out when I had a case of the giggles.

It’s been a few weeks since I took up Microsoft’s employee offer of a free Windows Phone 7 (when you renew a 2 year contract) and combined it with AT&T’s offer of buy-one-get-one-free for my wife.

So how have things been going?

It’s been quite a while since xbox.com had a major update and today sees the launch of the new version with a clean new look and a whole host of new features that our teams here at LIVE engagement have been working on.

There are a whole great new set of features, my favorites are below… note that some of these are not available in non-LIVE locales.

Recently I needed to map external data into in-memory objects. In such scenarios the TryParseTryParse methods of Int and String are useful but where is Enum.TryParseEnum.TryParse? TryParseTryParse exists in .NET 4.0 but like a lot of people I’m on .NET 3.5.

A quick look at Enum left me scratching my head.

Working on the .NET Framework was an interesting but often difficult time, especially when dealing with vague or incomprehensible bug reports.

Head to Bing, Google, official support sites and bug database if you have access to it (Microsoft Connect, Bugzilla for Firefox etc.) to see if others have run into this issue. Searching for the error message can yield good results but remove elements of the message specific to your project (e.g. class names, property names etc.)

It’s quite common that when you issue a query you’re going to want to join some additional tables.

In LINQ this can be a big issue as associations are properties and it’s easy to end up issuing a query every time you hit one. This is referred to as the SELECT N+1 problem and tools like EF Profiler can help you find them.

ASP.NET MVC is the technology that brought me to Microsoft and the west-coast and it’s been fun getting to grips with it these last few weeks.

Last week I needed to expose RSS feeds and checked out some examples online but was very disappointed.

I wanted an SSD for some time and finally caved in. Armed with credit card, screwdriver and trusty MacBook Pro I fitted a sweet SSD and decided to document the experience.

There are a bewildering number of options out there. Budget, as always, dictates the combination of speed and size available.

The Visual Studio Gallery is already home to 533 tools, controls and templates for VS 2010 and this number is sure to grow once VS 2010 hits RTM and people get to grips with the extendable new editor.

Don’t forget to check out The Visual Studio Blog for more tips, tricks and tools.

It’s been an interesting couple of years with nothing but a maxed-out MacBook Pro 17″ as my only home machine.

The hard drive died but time machine held my hand. At ALT.NET Seattle 2009 my backpack took a dive that left a dent in one corner. The battery was replaced and I roped GrinGod into obtaining a replacement UK-style \ key from the UK after some frantic typing.