The Windows 8 app developer blog recently published How to improve performance in your Metro style app . A lot of the content might be familiar, including the always-handy Interaction class table, but there are additional considerations to play nice with the rest of the system, particularly with regards...

Today's post is the result of about four hours of tracking down a tricky problem, so hopefully this will help others. My problem began when I was testing an Azure project with the storage emulator . The code that was supposed to work with the blob service would fail any request with a "503 - Service...

The Portable Library Tools CTP was announced! If you write code that targets multiple platforms, you'll find this pretty neat, as you'll get guidance from the tools as to which APIs you can use safely across different platforms: .NET, Silverlight, Windows Phone and XBOX 360. This turns out to be very...

Sometimes the memorable thing about using a device or program is one particular feature. There are one or two things that pop up in your mind. For example, when I think of using Microsoft Word, I think of the ribbon and the very nice font rendering and text styles - for some reason, I love staring with...

The other day someone was asking a question on the WinForms forums about the PropertyGrid class. This control is what you typically interact with to set properties in Visual Studio, and it's a very handy class that you can use at runtime as well for a quick way to allow users to edit an object. It is...

In case you missed it, something cool is coming on the "RESTful endpoint" side of things for Windows Live / Messenger Connect (to be honest, I don't know much about it, but I found the article terribly exciting, as I'm an avid user). http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowslive/archive/2010/04/29...

Morning post, so don't expect anything too deep. I was watching old episodes of Lie to Me while waiting for a sync/build/test cycle on my local machine (well, a bit of an episode, anyway), when I noticed the "Lie to Me Simplified" video in the "Video Extras" section. Other than loving the content...

Today, after a series of design posts, we'll be looking at something quite different. If you happen to be debugging a native application, you may find yourself stepping through code that calls a Win32 API and then never checks the last error, maybe because it's only looking at the result for pass...

Learn more about SP2 going out of support on the XML team blog. MSXML4 SP3 has been around for over a year now and has had a very positive reception. Get it! Share the good news with your friends! Of course, we're still encouraging everyone to migration to MSXML6 whenever possible, as that's our...

I often write small utilities for myself, usually in JScript. For example, I've been working with native code where I often need to look at VARIANT values, and I wanted a little utility that would crack down the variant type field into a human-readable value, including the masking values for arrays and...

Something I didn't know but find very, very cool: Windows 7 lets you know when you should consider replacing your laptop battery . My laptop is about a year old and I haven't seen the message yet, and I hope I won't see it for a while, but of course when my battery goes bad I'd rather know than perhaps...

If you build web sites and applications, you owe it to yourself to check out the resources at http://www.microsoft.com/web/ and to subscribe to the feed of the team blog to keep up to date with tools and capabilities. No reason to pass up on free software or to avoid leveraging the software you already...

Very, very cute of showing off some new Windows love - it even fits my attention span. http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx Don't know if this will still be around a few months from now, so for future reference, these are "7 second demos".

This is something that I've been asked more than once, and so here goes an answer that might help if you run into this. Let's say that you create a new project and borrow code or do something of the sort, and suddenly start getting an error message such as this one xmllite.h(49) : error C2146:...

Edward discusses how to set an integer in the MSXML APIs in this thread . I wanted to provide the snippet of code necessary to do this on an attribute, using the very awesome wrappers generated by the Visual C++ #import directive. The catch is that becausae a VARIANT is passed in, you can actually...

Gorgeous text is something I have long been passionate about . This recent Engineering Windows 7 blog post talks about Windows 7 improvements in text rendering and typography. I love the variations on the Gabriola font, and the stuff they do with the Valentines sample is amazing - note how the beginning...

In case you haven't seen the ads on TV, it turns out that Kylie (4 1/2) can you show in a few seconds of ultra-cuteness how to auto-correct a picture and send it to your family. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/rookies/kylie4/

In case you haven't heard, FolderShare will be going into retirement at some point, and Windows Live Sync, to be announced next month, will be the software you'll probable want to move to. For more details, the announcement is on the FolderShare site here: http://www.foldershare.com/syncpro.htm...

If you get this error message while logging in to a Windows Vista computer using Terminal Services, here is the magic sauce. http://blogs.msdn.com/spatdsg/archive/2007/03/14/atbroker-exe-application-error.aspx I don't know anything about the problem to be honest, but the solution (Ctrl+Alt+End...