Great MIX09 talk on ASP.NET AJAX 4.0. Stephen Walther is a really great presenter. I’m not an AJAX expert, but the improvements in ver 4 are pretty clear. The big news is vastly improved client-side support. Wrapping your server-side controls with update...

Attended a really good presentation about Expression Web 3 at MIX09. Wow, this is a fabulous product for anyone who has ever gone through the pain of building HTML & CSS for a complex web page. SuperPreview is the flashiest feature. It lets you view...

I’ve been hearing about “Mesh applications” recently, and I’ve been wondering exactly what that means. Is a Mesh app something that runs in the context of the Mesh Operating Environment or your desktop in the cloud? And how do Mesh applications relate...

Oslo Repository and Models Coming into this session with very little concept of why I should care about Oslo. I don't know what it is or how it can help me. Let's see... Compoents: M Modeling Language Deployment tool to install model to DB Repository...

Morning Keynotes Windows 7 Impressed by Steven Sinofsky's on-stage presence and very happy to hear about the Windows team's plans for Windows 7, which is being distributed to PDC attendees in "pre-beta" form. Some good stuff: Dramatically better...

Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure this morning, and the new Azure forums have gone live on the MSDN Social Platform: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/azure . Follow Azure on MSDN Bookmarks: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US...

My team updated the MSDN and TechNet Bookmarks application eariler this week, and it's way faster and more reliable. Bookmarks v1.0 shipped last month, and we've more than tripled the total volume of bookmarks that we collected in our 3 1/2 month beta...

The Social Platform, as well as the other MSDN & TechNet apps, is hosted by the Microsoft.com Operations team, with servers in the same data centers that host Live, MSNBC, etc. I've been fascinated to learn how much application performance varies...

When people learn that I work on MSDN and TechNet, one of the first things I hear is that our Search solution is really terrible. The best way to find something on our sites, they say, is to use Google. A year ago I would have agreed, but now I...

I've been meaning to blog more often, and some of the questions I'm getting about our new Social Bookmarks app have given me a good excuse to talk about the thinking behind the Social Platform. This blog post started with some tough questions from...

The blogosphere is starting to buzz about our new Social Bookmarks preview app that went live today. While most bloggers are focusing on the MSDN version , we have also shipped versions for TechNet , Expression (screenshot below) and a generic Microsoft...

There are several interesting things coming soon from the Community Platform team. Social Bookmarking We're releasing a nice Social Bookmarking Preview in late May. Our marketing team is planning some minor hoopla to show the app off at TechEd. ...

I've got a really interesting job opening for an experienced technical PM who wants to work on some fun Web 2.0 stuff. Here's the detail... Job Description DevDiv’s Server & Tools Online team is seeking a highly technical senior program manager...

The first version of the STO Community Platform went live on Valentine's Day, Thursday, February 14. My team has built this platform to host all community applications for MSDN, TechNet and the new Expression site. This release includes an all-new...

Welcome to my new blog, where I plan to write about my team's work to enhance the MSDN and TechNet web sites. I am the Group Program Manager for the Server & Tools Online team. I am one of the managers for a standard Microsoft engineering team...