For a developer, Windows Live offers a huge amount of potential, particularly for taking advantage of the success we've had with Hotmail and Messenger contacts (billions of records), and Windows Live Spaces. Plus the terrific service from Silverlight...

We have just released a plug-in for Expression Encoder that makes it child's play to publish videos to your Silverlight Streaming account. What does this actually mean? The answer depends on what you know: For people who already know what Silverlight...

What is it? I have blogged about SkyDrive before but I'd like to include it in this series for completeness. So what is it? Think of it as a USB stick on the web. It's 1GB of free storage that you can use however you like - but generally I find it really...

What is it? A new feature of Windows Live Spaces that let's you set up events eg you can set up a social gathering of some kind and invite people to it, and organise it all via your Space. Now you might say "but I've seen this before on xxx website"...

We recorded most of the sessions at the recent Mix:UK event and have now made them available online for you to view / download. They're available at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/mix07/agenda.aspx , and worth a look. The Scott Guthrie sessions are particularly...

A while ago I blogged about Popfly, our great mashup and website creation tool. Since then it has progressed enormously and has just been opened up completely so that anyone can give it a try. So if you haven't experienced Popfly before head on over to...

What is it? Software that automatically joins up a number of separate photos of a scene into a single combined image, providing a panoramic view (as per above example). The new Windows Live Photo Gallery does just that, and does a great job. You simply...

Here's the second piece about cool Windows Live stuff that's worth knowing about. What is it? I'm sure you're aware that Virtual Earth has a very cool in-browser 3D mode that really sets it apart from other web mapping solutions. You may also be...

We're releasing quite a bit of new stuff - some in beta, some final release - around Windows Live and I'm finding that much of the time people aren't aware of what some of the cool pieces are. So I decided it might be useful to blog a few of these, and...

I'm just back from holiday (my way of explaining the lack of blog postings recently) and I'd like to make sure that people are aware of a whole host of technical developer events that are coming up. Some things to bear in mind: These events are...