Mark Johnston's Blog

A few of the 10 team are talking about their latest video - a demo of the new Zune. I'm quite impressed with what will be possible but still made the decision to get my wee sis a White iPod Video (she doens't read the blog so won't know til next weekend...

Don't need to say much really, just look (click to see them in full 256 * 256 res) ... Link to IStartedSomething.com tags: vista , user experience , icons

It's Friday and I stumbled across this little nugget of Kazakhstan gold! A great example of how user experience when really bad can be really good, in the context it is set! http://borat.tv Can't wait for the movie to come out here in the UK Jagshemash...

MikeO on my team asked me what was Expression Web's support for ASP.NET Themes - a great bit of functionality in ASP.NET 2.0 which allows developers to dictate the appearance of controls in a web application using template files with a .skin extension...

Over the past few team meetings when we go through all the events for the next few months, I keep mentioning that I am going to Australia with my girlfriend for a glorious 3 weeks and won't be around all of December. It will be my first break longer than...

Last night, I talked about Expression Web and how it is a great new design tool for web developers wishing to create visually compelling, standards based websites (either HTML or ASP.NET). I showed a load of great features which you woudn't necessarily...

I have to admit that over the past week or so I have been getting more nervous sitting quietly in the corner of our floor in TVP. You see, I have given lots (100s) of presentations over the past 3 years at MS, talked to senior academics in top universities...

http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=085 Funky! Will have to get myself one of these :-) tags: mouse , presenting , gadgets

I get a regular email from the people over on www.theserverside.net and the most recent one included some interesting stuff for web developers and those interested in developing clients using WPF. First, people are porting Ruby onto the .NET Framework...

I've attended one DDD event before and they are great fun. Another one is coming and the organisers are looking for session proposals. If you are up for talking on a technology area which you are passionate about and think others would find it useful...

As a developer learning a lot of new stuff I find myself constantly searching on one of two search engines - Live and Google to find stuff. And a lot of the time the search results lead me back to our developer network, MSDN. I just spotted on an internal...

The Sidebar gadget team are blogging - hopefully they will have much more insightful stuff than my hacking :) http://blogs.msdn.com/sidebar/default.aspx tags: vista , sidebar , gadgets

Just spotted on Adam Kinney's blog that there is an updated version of the documentation live on MSDN for developing Vista Sidebar gadgets. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/sidebar/sidebar/overviews/gdo.asp tags:...

The product formerly known as Expression Web Designer is now called just Expression Web and the product group have just shipped Beta 1 for customers to download and play with. In case you don't know what EW (see, getting into th swing of acronymns...

One of the main focus areas for my sports gadget was to make the gadget as simple as possible and keep all the hard work on the server - to reduce complexity for the client and if I'm honest I find it easier to do that in C# than Javascript (which I am...

In my new role as a Developer Evangelist working on web technologies for designers and developers, I thought it would be a good idea to break the typical Microsoft techy mold and not have a beefy laptop or tablet to do demos and presentations on. I have...

I've been following the development of XNA for a long time since it's introduction at GDC a couple of years ago and was aware of the developments with XNA Express and the possibility to develop games for the Xbox 360. In my old job I used to spend a lot...