Mark Johnston's Blog

After a hectic 5 days on the road and good 1000+ miles covered the team completed 5 days, 9 venues and several hours worth of content delivered to countless delegates. For those that weren't following here are some short snippets with links to the appropriate...

Friday past was the main developer launch event for Windows Vista and Office 2007 at Thames Valley Park in Reading. It was a big day for the team as we have been working on it for the past couple of weeks constantly and before Christmas for some of the...

Mike Ormond is running the London Marathon this year and needs to raise a lot of money for his chosen charity Hearing Dogs for Deaf People . His goal is to raise £1000 which I believe Microsoft will match. So, if you are feeling generous and want to make...

... thanks to RoadAngel . The cool thing about this is it's the first time I've heard that the Road Angel Blackspot has been developed on top of the Windows CE platform compared to the big player in Europe, TomTom, which is based on Linux. And...

Layout is one of WPF's fundamentals and can be used to create complex layouts which scale according to desktop contstraints. In this nugget, we look at the various types of Panels which enable developers to create elegant layouts in our applications....

My boss Kevin showed me the car and how it will look: So, if you see either of those images on the motorway network of the UK then please feel free to drive alongside and WHEN SAFE TO DO SO wave :). Even better, take a photo of the vehicle and post it...

The Vista and Office developer launch is fully under way. Yesterday we did the "live" recording for the sessions that will be delivered on Friday at Thames Valley Park in Reading. It was pretty daunting and I'm sure I will be up for some stick when people...

With Vista general availability under 3 weeks away, there are more and more companies jumping on the WPF and great user experience bus. Yahoo has just announced its new Messenger applicatin which takes advantage of the .NET Fx 3 and more importantly WPF...

This may not be to everyone's taste, but when I use Visual Studio to edit XAML files I normally want to do it in XAML rather than visually with the designer. By default, every time I open a XAML file it tries to open in the designer view. This is especially...

I should just rename this the <Mark announces events and conferences blog>...it's a busy time at the moment with all these events on the horizon and I haven't found time to do any meaty blog content. That will hopefully change after next Friday...

Phil Winstanley has been a busy boy over the festive break and has set up the Backnetwork for the WebDD event on the 3rd February. So, registration is very close to opening and if you have experience of attending DDD events you will know too well that...

Matt has been working away on gadgets for a while now , and is becoming a bit of a guru on developing gadgets. He's actually working on an internal tool for our group to help promote awareness of the various programs and teams in DPE. Check out his latest...

...all you have to do is attend the Vista/Office launch event for developers were such leading visionaries in the world of technology like Mike Taulty , Martin Parry , Daniel Moth , Mike Ormond and lesser known ones like me will be presenting. Ian Moulster...

Thanks to Tim I've probably got a few bits and pieces to install to get my machine up to dream spec for developing WPF applications Highlights for me: - XamlPadX , Kaxaml and XamlCruncher (great for little demos) - Kevin's Bag-o-Tricks : fun way to learn...

Ian Dixon who is a Media Center MVP based in the UK spotted that a new Windows Live beta has been unveiled for Media Center enthusiasts. It is a great example of how an application/service (like Live Messenger or Spaces) can be brought to the 10' UI....