Innovation Showcase

Windows Explorer is one of the most frequently used Windows tools by users. However, there are times when you need to open two screens, or navigate from one screen to another, in order to, for example, copy files between two folders, or between your hard...

One of the coolest new features in Silverlight 4 is the ability to capture audio and video input from Web Cameras.  With a few simple lines of code, you can request permission to your users to leverage their capture devices and then capture both...

Regular expressions provide a concise and flexible means for identifying strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters.  A regular expression  is a special text string for describing a search pattern. For example...

Rob Bagby has started a new series (blog posts and screencasts) on Patterns-Based Development with Silverlight.  The series illustrates various design patterns while building a sample application (see screenshot below).  The patterns covered...

While many users have just got their hands on Windows 7 or are about to, some people have looked beyond the current release. Technologizer talked to journalists, technologists, and former Microsoft employees and gathered their mostly divergent views and...

Windows XP mode is an optional add-on to Windows 7 that provides a seamless virtual environment to run applications depending on XP. If it becomes necessary to uninstall Windows XP Mode, all you have to do is to uninstall it as you would with any application...

Mike Taulty has published an excellent series of screencasts illustrating some of the ideas found in " Prism " or the " Composite Application Guidance " from the Patterns and Practices team that can be used to build Silverlight applications...

Feature Packs enable you to extend Visual Studio 2010 with capabilities that enhance and complement the existing tools. These releases expand the scenarios where you can use Visual Studio to help you create better software. Check-out what’s now available...

Peter Galli reporting form PDC09… Today, at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) here in Los Angeles, we announced not only the release of version 4.0 of  the.NET Micro Framework, but also that we are open sourcing the product and...

Yesterday at TechEd North America , Jason Zander announced the release of the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools . This is a Microsoft-supported release, shipping on the Visual Studio Gallery. It is a package of extremely powerful Code Editor...

The ribbon concept was first introduced with Office 2007 and is now natively supported on Windows 7. Developers can create ribbon applications with rich user interface with either C++ or managed code such as C# or VB.NET. To get started with creating...

Here is the first-ever on-line game that combines the power of Silverlight 3 with Windows 7 Multi-Touch to give you a browser experience like never before!  If you own a Multi-Touch computer and have Windows 7 Installed, you are in for a treat. ...

This is a simple RSS reader application that shows how easy it is to build applications for Windows Phones 7. In particular, it shows how to work with XML & LINQ to XML. You can download the source code at codeplex .

Did you know that Webcams and microphones are now accessible from Silverlight 4 applications? Developers can enable video and audio sharing for real-time collaboration and interactive multimedia applications. This video (and code samples by Tim...

Ever looking for a new, generic, way to incorporate asynchronous programming capabilities into your applications? Ever wish you could just write a LINQ query over your application events and just create reaction methods for when an event occurs? Well...

The Microsoft Report Viewer control enables applications that run on the .NET Framework to display reports designed using Microsoft reporting technology. In server mode , the ReportViewer control can connect to and leverage the features of SQL Server...

Need help justifying Silverlight for your developing mission-critical RIA Applications?   Check-out the latest Gartner report – released December 31, 2009 under the title “ MarketScope for Ajax Technologies and Rich Internet Application Platforms...

Check out this Channel 9 Azure-focused episode with Jim Zimmerman , CTO of Thuzi where he talks about building their Facebook application for Outback Steakhouse that was hosted in Windows Azure.  http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benriga/Azure-Lessons...

David Hill (Architect on the Microsoft Patterns & Practices team) has been working on a sample application that shows how you can use Prism and .Net RIA Services together.  You can check out his blog post at: http://blogs.msdn.com/dphill/archive...

If you like the Netflix Silverlight player’s ability to show thumbnails while fast-forwarding, here’s an example that does it with The Silverlight Media Framework player and Expression Encoder: http://blogs.msdn.com/synergist/archive/2010/01/22/scrubbing...

Check-out this comprehensive blog post by Tim Heuer – who outlines all the cool new SL4 features announced at the PDC in November - with links to videos and code samples to help you get started with each new capability.  Here is a link to his complete...

Recently Bob Familiar had the pleasure of sitting down with Michael Iantosca, CEO of eDefine , Paul Hamnett, VP of engineering at the Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI.org), and Kerri Sweeney , Director of Development at IHI, to learn about a new...

One of the uses of Cloud Computing is to provide an environment in which organizations can run their own custom applications in the Cloud. This is important because most organizations today have an IT presence whose purpose is to build custom software...

While working on a Windows 7 application that allows users to choose their preferred colors to customize selected objects, I came across a few examples that I found very useful in terms of helping me get started working with colors from the development...

In this blog post I discuss the recent announcement that Microsoft is “All In” the Cloud and how how twenty million businesses and over a billion people use Microsoft cloud services today. It also covers a major speech on the subject given by Steve...