Jared Bienz's Blog

I’m doing the first presentation of my Windows Phone Gaming bootcamp today at the University of Houston. If you’d like you can download the labs and samples below.   Labs bit.ly/WinPhoneGamingLabs   Advanced Labs bit.ly/WinPhoneGamingAdvancedLabs...

I’m doing my first delivery of the Advanced WP7 Design Tips and Tricks tonight for the D2Sig user group. If you came to hear me talk, thank you! You can download the deck and the samples from my SkyDrive here .

I’ll be at Houston TechFest tomorrow talking about Windows Phone development with Silverlight and letting people get hands-on time with real devices. If you came to hear my talk, thank you!!! Please don’t forget about free support and getting your marketplace...

Did you know there are more than 4 million .Net developers worldwide? That number includes known Microsoft partners as well as millions of startups, students and hobbyists developing on Microsoft technologies every day. Training and supporting this many...

I just completed a cool ‘Scaling Azure’ video on Channel 9 with my friend Joseph Fultz (Dallas MTC) and our buddy Joshua Kurlinski from Symon. Check it out! http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/jbienz/Scaling-Web-Sites-with-Azure-and-Local-Cache/

Over this past last year I’ve had so many great discussions on SketchFlow , and what an amazing tool it can be for rapidly prototyping and developing ideas. Very recently a co-worker and friend of mine, Sara Summers , completed her book Dynamic Prototyping...

Windows 7 is important to all of us in the PC ecosystem, and my team is striving to provide you with every resource we can to help you be confident supporting the platform. With that in mind, I’ve asked our Windows 7 specialist team fly into Dallas and...

Did you know Windows 7 was released to manufacturing on July 22 nd and is already available for download on MSDN and TechNet? Did you know computer manufacturers could begin shipping Windows 7 PCs as early as this month? Many large IT departments have...

Over the past two years we’ve seen some incredible applications built on WPF and Silverlight. But application style doesn’t happen on its own, and many of the questions I’m asked these days are centered around application styling and custom controls....

By now you’ve hopefully seen SketchFlow and how it can help you conceptualize your projects before turning them into reality. If not, I highly recommend you check out the Mix ‘09 session Sketch Flow: From Concept to Production . One of the tasks common...

It only been since 2006 that we seriously started to drive WPF adoption, and Silverlight 2 hit the web just a scant 11 months ago. Still, in such short time ISVs have created some amazing things with these platforms. Unfortunately, though the platforms...

WPF and Silverlight have been out for a while now, and the number of controls available for these platforms is surprising. Consider this rather comprehensive list of Silverlight controls by Tim Heuer with at least 17 vendors and over 160 controls. Or...

Several of you joined us last October for the pilot XAMLfest in Houston Texas. The tour has grown up quite a bit since then, and we’re now starting to cover Silverlight 3 and Blend 3. Even better, we’re taking the tour online so you don’t have to leave...

I’ll be presenting Blend Tips and Tricks for application designers in a few venues over the next two months. The first session is tomorrow night at the D2Sig user group here in Houston. As usual, I’m ‘borrowing’ from other excellent resources created...

There are several challenges that need to be solved when building social applications. The ability for users to invite friends and share data amongst themselves is one example. If you want to add support for loosely-connected portable devices, synchronization...

It’s a rare occasion that I get out of bed before 10 AM on a Saturday. Even less common is that I’m doing it to present. But the good news is I’m really looking forward to my sessions tomorrow at Houston TechFest . I hope to meet cool people that have...

SharePoint interest is growing with leaps and bounds, but there are still many scenarios that make more sense to leave in rich client applications. The question I've been asked a lot lately is how to bring these two worlds closer together. Say, for example...

I recently had the honor of participate in Incubation Week out in Silicon Valley. Leading up to the event we realized that at least two out of our six participants wanted to integrate Virtual Earth and Silverlight. I searched for guidance online but only...

I finally turned a demo I do frequently for my ISVs into a MSDN Screencast: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/jbienz/Silverlight-Image-Search-with-LINQ-to-XML/ Check it out. This was based on Scott Guthrie's Digg sample .

Transitionals has finally been released to the public! I know it's been some time since I last posted on Transitionals but it turns out it took longer to get approval for the project through legal than I had anticipated. I suppose I should have anticipated...

I mentioned in my last post that Nick worked for a while at NASA. Well, last Thursday I had the opportunity to take a special private tour with Nick and Frank Hughes who also worked at NASA for over 20 years. I'm too young to have my own memories of Apollo...

At the 2008 product launch I had a chance to meet an interesting individual by the name of Nick Davis. Nick and I chatted at great length about XNA and game development in general. Turns out we share a lot of interests and we even kicked around the idea...

The Transitionals project is up! Or at least it's created. You can try to visit it at CodePlex/Transitionals but the project isn't published yet so I don't know what you'll see. We don't plan to publish it until we get the source code in there. We've...

I'm so ready to click that thing -- Transitionals is ready to go! Since my last post, so many things have happened. Certainly not the least of which is having David Hill from the original Acropolis team do a code reviewing with me over Live Meeting. How...

I meant to blog about this Monday night when I wrapped it up, but it was after midnight and I was too tired. In Transitionals, any control that supports a transition (like TransitionElement or SlideShow) can take accept a single Transition through the...