There's an interesting post on the shell blog called What happened to the menu bars? I find the trend a bit disturbing, not so much because I miss the menu bars, but because of the lack of consistency. I realize that applications need to innovate with...

Ok, time to wrap this up :-) Now, we'll finally build what I'm calling a view model for managing a portfolio of stocks (building on the StockModel example from previous posts). A view model is a class that will be used as the DataContext for a data...

In part 5 , I talked about commands and how they are used for behavior. Now, I want to talk about a better way to encapsulate them. First, I'll create a CommandModel class that encapsulates the RoutedCommand and the enabled/execute code. This is all pretty...

They've done some cool stuff in iTunes 7. I hope someone comes out with a subscription video service before long. I much prefer the subscription model for music. The new 3D album art is nice looking (not unlike Max's mantle view!). I find it is pretty...

There's a TechCrunch article on Max's RSS reading here . I'm glad to see people like it. While the newspaper-like view isn't perfect for all feeds, I think it works really well. One piece of feedback that was in the comments is that it doens't tie into...

You can now download a new version of Microsoft Max ! It's on .Net Framework 3.0 RC1. We're not on some ancient WinFx version this time! Unfortunately, Vista isn't officially supported at this time. There was a lot of work under the hood to improve scalability...

Windows Live Marketplace looks like a cool way to find Windows software. Give it a try! Link to Windows Marketplace: Software & hardware for the Windows operating system

Long ago I complained about cmd.exe. At the time, I tried out some of the replacements and didn't find anything I liked. But, I just tried out a Console 2.0 beta, and I love it! The way it hosts cmd.exe is necessarily a bit of a hack, but they pull it...