Starting at 8:30am Eastern (5:30am Pacific) you can pre-order your very own IPad from the Apple Store.Although this is just a pre-order, shipping units should be arriving on April 3rd.  What (if any) version do you plan to buy?

Here at the DigitForge offices we have projects that require purchasing a couple units. Although the emulators are good, you just never know how well your applications work until you are using it on the device itself. To that end, we will probably be purchasing:

• 1 x $499 basic 16GB
• 1 x $629 16GB 3G with $29 unlimited data plan

What? Why the 3G? How else do you know how responsive your application is in a real-world situation? If it wasn’t for this testing requirement, we would pass on the 3G altogether.

As most of you know, Visual Studio 2010 has moved into RC territory and sports a nifty GoLive license. This means you can download and use the RC for shipping projects.  With this release of Visual Studio, we at DigitForge are looking to fully leverage some of the web and SQL deployment tools built into the VS client.  The tools/wizards themselves are pretty straightforward. But in the next upcoming series of blog posts I will describe how to implement the server-side portion of these tools. Basically we will be looking at supporting these tools from a Hosting perspective.

Web Deploy Tool - this is how you support web site publishing.

SQL Publishing Services - this is how you support SQL publishing.

Each upcoming blog post will outline how to find and install these on your server. Come back soon!