I love the fact that Win7 has ISO burning built-in. I’m running a pre-release build of Win7, and after downloading the ISO from the internal shares (not from the web :), I just pop in a DVD-R, double-click on the ISO and: Twenty minutes later, I’m happily...

I’m not entirely sure what these folks are thinking, but I’m getting a little worried about our marketing budget…  :) In case you don’t want to watch the whole thing, this, by the way, comes after “Get Ready for PowerPoint”.

Office 2010 Technical Preview is coming up. If you’re interested in getting in on it, check out the nomination info on the PowerPoint team blog . Btw, this movie is crazy. I wish I knew where they were going with it (you’d think they’d tell me, but they...

The guy who writes the minimsft blog has a nicely honed sense of irony . And you know, speaking of The Commons: I trekked over there today ( meh, not the sunniest day ) and I have to say it's an impressive space. I walked around admiring the scope of...

I’ve often gotten the idea that a Yahoo! Product Manager is more or less the same as our Program Management. Their new CEO, whose attitude I like (she happily discourses on the things she thinks are ridiculous about their products – something that she...

Several years ago, at the beginning of the “Longhorn” project (which eventually became Windows Vista), I worked on a project that was attempting to solve the problem of how to make file sharing in small networks (particularly at home) both simple and...

Not too long ago, I joined the PowerPoint team. Thought I spend most of my time working on a related project , I do spend a lot of time working with PowerPoint itself, and I’m constantly amazed at the things that people do with PowerPoint. Recently, on...

Something’s going on the interwebs. I think it might be hell freezing over . That’s really cool! I wonder who is working on that stuff.

In a detailed post over on E7 about the Win7 design process comes this: With regard to where ideas come from, what we like to say is that the job of program management is not to have all the great ideas but to make sure all the great ideas are ultimately...

Move stop-and-refresh back to where they were in IE6 This was going to be my first post in this series, but the Vista Team blog stole my thunder with a much more detailed post covering lots of the chrome customizations, so I left it for last. :) Be sure...

  Authenticated RSS Feeds When we first released the Windows RSS platform a number of people asked us about authenticated feeds. As I said in those posts, it was a hard cut for IE7, but I’m really happy to see that it’s here for IE8 :) To set up...

Clone your current place One of the nice things about the “New Window” (Ctrl-N) feature dating back to early releases of IE, is that it always duplicates the current open window, as well as all of its state – in particular, the window’s history. When...

Use your address bar for searching A little-known fact is that IE has always had a combination address-bar/search box (this goes back to at least IE6). Well, to be fair, I thought this was fairly well-known until reviewers starting going nuts over the...

Searching the future This morning I wanted to find out where I read about that “Skymarket” initiative. Off to IE, type in “skymarket” and it shows me not just Long Zheng’s original post , which I had read but also Joe Wilcox’s commentary , which I hadn...

Formatted View Source You don’t have to be a pro developer to love this one. Since the very beginning, IE has relied on the built-in Notepad editor to show page source. Notepad, it should be noted is not a source viewer. In IE8, for the first time, the...

IE8 has a lot of big new features (see the IE blog for more of that), but what I like about it is the small things. This is the first in a short series of my favorites little features that I haven’t seen mentioned much (or at all) elsewhere: Search Engine...

I don’t think Yahoo likes us anymore. IE8 Beta 2 ships, and they start pushing Firefox on their home page . Here’s the funny thing. They didn’t really want to work too hard on the page. Here’s the page they used for IE7, followed by the page they are...

I had to chuckle this afternoon when Steven Sinofsky exploded upon the Internet with one of his missives describing the Windows 7 Team on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. Steven has been blogging on the internal network since late 2006, and his blog posts...

A long time ago, someone decided that Outlook should be able to browse web pages inside its frame*. Among other things, the “Web” toolbar was created, with a full complement of browser controls, including an address bar. Shortly afterwards, people came...

Those who know me know that I have something of a keyboard/mouse fascination. I’ve gotten almost every interesting new keyboard and/or mouse that the company makes. To be clear though, what I’m looking for is a better keyboard and mouse, not just a pretty...

When you look at this picture , you are overwhelmed by Apple logos. There are other laptops there, but they don’t stand out. Apple laptops do two important things with their logo. First, it is the right way up when the lid is open. To do that, the logo...

A long time ago when I worked on Windows XP, I worked on a project to add Bluetooth PAN support to Windows. At the time (March 2004), I wrote : We also added Bluetooth Personal Area Networking (PAN) support. PAN is a Bluetooth profile that essentially...

About a month ago (shortly after joining a new team ), I upgraded laptops at work. For the first time in my Microsoft career, I selected a non-Toshiba laptop, choosing the ridiculously small delight of the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 . Yes, that would be the...

Yesterday morning I got a call from my old buddies on the IE team asking me to help out with a cake delivery. I was happy to help out, and Gerry’s Cakes ( www.gerryscakes.com ) in Menlo Park was able to pull together an awesome 3D cake with only a couple...

I’ve been using Media Center for about 3 years as my primary TV viewing solution. One of things I love about using Media Center (vs., say, Tivo or some other PVR solution) is that since it’s a PC, I can install new things on it, and, when...