Leo's Rantings

At the 2008 PDC, Kam Vedbrat and I introduced two brand new DirectX APIs, to be included in Windows 7: Direct2D and DirectWrite. Direct2D is geared towards high-quality vector and bitmap graphics, with the performance characteristics of hardware-acceleration...

Anders Hejlsberg demonstrated the dynamic programming features of C# 4.0. Very cool was C# calling JavaScript code without extra casts, calls to Invoke, and the like -- just straight function calls in C# that happen to be implemented in JavaScript. Even...

PDC 2008 day 1: Ray Ozzie unveiled " Windows Azure ", our operating system for the cloud. After years of thinking of "operating system" as something that runs a computer, it's weird to think about the meaning of the term with respect to a large set of...

I'm back in Los Angeles for this year's PDC. It was a long shot, given that the group I happen to be on is sending a smaller percentage of people to the PDC than the WPF team did back in '05, but thankfully I have an opportunity to present, which means...

Microsoft has been offering bus service in Redmond for about a year now. The idea is that the bus has a dedicated, direct route from close to your house to the Microsoft campus and back, with no stops in between, and that the route times are not only...

It seems we've settled on an official name for the next version of Windows, codenamed Windows 7, and that name is (drumroll...) " Windows 7 ".

Los Angeles, here I come again. The conference is WinHEC 2007, and this time I'll be participating as a speaker, presenting an overview of the graphics architecture in Windows Vista. For people who have seen the graphics overview presentation last year...

It's been just over seven months since my last post, so I'm happy to inform that reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated :). What's been going on this whole time? Since the 2005 PDC I've been very busy getting Windows Vista (and, more specifically...

It got crazy at the PDC in terms of hours -- I was getting in by 8am, wrapping up at 11pm, and starting over at 8am the next day. That taxed my blogging abilities, so I never put together a "day four" or "day five". The theme for the two days was ...

If you've been posting to microsoft.windows.developer.winfx.avalon then you should check out the brand-new MSDN forum for Windows Presentation Foundation . The forum lets us do a couple of extra things we can't do with newsgroups, such as maintain ratings...

Another day at the PDC, another set of exciting events. I started the day early again, though we made it to the morning's keynote a couple of minutes late. We did see, however, the introduction and demonstration of various designer tools, including the...

Though this was my second day at the event, it was actually the first full official day of the PDC, with everything fully staffed and attended. It was a packed day, with lots of great stuff to talk about. Let me start at the top. Opening keynotes ...

Today I registered and got my badge at the PDC. The conference doesn't officially start until tomorrow (other than the "pre-conference" sessions), but several Microsofties were at the Convention Center to make sure everything is set up and ready to go...

It'd been nice and warm in Redmond right up until this past week. This morning it was pouring rain. Now, some of you may know Seattle as the city where it rains nine months out of the year, but what's not necessarily generally known is that the constant...

Hoje descobri que Pablo Fernicola está escrevendo o seu blog em não um, não dois, mas três idiomas -- e um deles é o português! E por que não? A gente pode morar nos Estados Unidos, mas têm muitos brasileiros aqui (aliás, "aqui" é o mundo todo quando...

As I mentioned in my opening entry, I'll be at the PDC next week. I'll be doing various things at the conference, but the majority of my time will be spent in the Hands-on Labs area, where I'll be helping attendees go through the Windows Presentation...

Well, it's about time. I've been wanting to start a blog for some time now, but for some reason or another I've been putting it off. Perhaps the biggest worry I've had is that I may not have anything interesting to say. However, after reading other...