I’m something of an environmentalist and also a data collector , so I was delighted when Microsoft Hohm announced the availability of a near-realtime power monitor for home use. Even though I participate in Seattle City Light’s Green Power and Green up...

Providing a nice follow-up to my recent post on modern programming environments , Don Burnett compares the developer experience for Apple’s iPhone to Microsoft’s Phone 7. Windows Phone comes out on top, as Don explains in this nice slide deck. iPhone...

Download from here: Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta After my recent pleasant introduction to Windows Phone development, I’m now an enthusiastic advocate. Two of the new features that really catch my eye are: Blend support - Expression Blend 4 for Windows...

After starting my new job in Core OS, it became clear that I would need to brush up on my old COM-programming skills, which I haven’t used in about, oh, eight years. It’s been all .NET Framework since I hired on as a full-time employee at MSFT. A good...

As one of my first undertakings in my new group, I wrote a little introductory overview of classic COM, which is now live: COM Technical Overview . Before this, we didn’t have a central topic that brings a bunch of fundamental ideas together, so now we...

Expression Blend 4 makes it easier than ever to design your WPF and Silverlight apps. Here are the official bullet points: Create rich web experiences, games, desktop apps, and more. Design apps that use the full power of Silverlight. Take your ideas...

New job! I’ve hopped over from the excellent Developer Division User Education org to the cool Windows Server Information Experience group, ‘way on the other side of the Server & Tools business unit , where I’ll be providing sample code and docs for...

Not to mention SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010. You are invited to attend the virtual launch on May 12, 2010 at 11:00am EST . You can pre-order from the Microsoft Company Store by clicking on the following picture. Pre-order Office 2010...

And it’s good. Download the full trial version here: Visual Studio 2010 Downloads . Technorati Tags: Visual Studio , .NET Framework , Silverlight , WPF Designer

The story so far: Realtime Brainwave Data with WPF and Fun with brainwaves, part 2 . So the code is finally somewhat presentable for public consumption. You can download it from here: Realtime Neurodata Display . If you have the Research Edition of the...

Go grab your copy of Visual Studio 2010 RC here . Rewritten in WPF, this is the slickest version of VS yet. Too many features to go into now, but here are a couple of my favorites. The WPF and Silverlight Designer for Visual Studio now has complete parity...

Update: Code is posted here . A wonderful thing happened since my last post on this project. The friendly folks at Emotiv listened to their devoted users and opened up the raw electrode data from their amazing EPOC neuroheadset ( just $299 ). That’s a...

Here is one of the coolest applications of WPF ever: Bling . It’s a completely new way to leverage the WPF platform for high-performance graphics development. Bling experiments with a programming model that combines the ease of programming provided by...

In past versions of our Visual Studio and .NET Framework documentation, you may have experienced frustration when you tried to access our WPF sample code. No more. We’ve picked the best samples, hoisted them out of the docs, updated them for Visual Studio...

As I promised in Fun with brainwaves, part 1 , I’ve written a little WPF application that displays realtime data from Emotiv’s Epoc neuroheadset. It’s a very simple monitoring app, named WPFEmotivClient, that displays the data stream from either EmoComposer...

For years, I’ve been interested in human brainwaves, especially the possibility of using nonlinear dynamics (“chaos theory”) to analyze them. But affordable EEG devices simply have not been available. Back in the early 90s, I built a little device from...

If you want to author custom design-time experiences for your WPF controls, this is a good place to start. We have samples for custom adorners, context menus, property value editors, and advanced scenarios. This code is written for Visual Studio 2010...

Ever wondered how to test your WPF, Windows Forms, .Net Framework, and Win32 applications programmatically? Of course you have. Now there’s the TestApi , a library of test and utility APIs that enables developers and testers to create automated tests...

At the request of the Parallel .NET team, I’ve cleaned up the code from my earlier post, WPF and the Parallel Extensions . Reaction-diffusion visualization You can download the code from here: WPF and Parallel .NET . Have fun! Technorati Tags: .NET Framework...

I like to play around with the occasional new Microsoft technology, and since I recently traded my old Treo for an HTC Touch Pro , it seemed like it might be fun to check out the onboard accelerometers. Fortunately, courageous bloggers have probed the...

I have to say I’ve been impressed with Microsoft’s recent efforts to green up. All the cafeterias have compostable dining ware now – it’s quite a blast to dump everything on my tray into a single receptacle labeled “Compost.” Now Microsoft is publicly...

Don’t miss the live stream from MIX ‘09. Scott Guthrie is on right now. Lots of exciting new announcements coming today.  

It’s been over six months since the Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5, June 2008 CTP release, and I’ve been wanting to play around with that stuff for awhile. It’s all shipping in .NET Framework 4.0 and is considered by Soma to be a key cloud...

For no obvious reason, I had a sudden need to write a particle system that simulates a Maxwell-Boltzmann gas, which forms the basis for the kinetic theory of gases. The trick is to implement momentum-conserving collisions as the particles bang into each...

I haven't even started writing the docs for SL designer extensibility, and here's Justin Angel with a great blog post that's worthy of the Visual Studio documentation. Maybe I can steal it without anybody noticing... Siverlight Design Time Extensibility...