Mark Johnston's Blog

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...

It's week one for me getting back to dev-land and I have to admit that it's not been the easiest experience, but it is getting there now. I thought it would be worthwhile noting down my thoughts and pointers for people following the same path I am. This...

as promised. What an experience! My set can be found here Other UK ICers photos are here and here

..still only kidding about the killer bots, but he has written a great tutorial over on my old academic blog (Mint Source - the only sheep blogger i know of) on how to create a bot that remembers everything you want it to. Go check it out here (note to...

After 8 days, 12000 miles of plane journeys, about 3 hours sleep a night and one of hell of a time I am back in the UK after attending and supporting all the teams at this year's Imagine Cup competition. My job for the event was to host Team 3Pair representing...

Things are a little hectic here as we get ready for the Imagine Cup finals in India on Saturday. The team were down on Monday for a trip to the British Broadcasting Corporation to do a radio interview with Gareth Mitchell from the Beeb's world service...

A cool new community for designers interested in the interactive design of Web 2.0 and with a focus currently on the Windows Live services and SDKs. www.remerged.com/remerged

Darren Strange is an Office Product Manager here in the UK and has posted a great blog entry about delivering top presentations using that little known tool called PowerPoint. It suits my presentation style really well and has given me some techniques...

http://www.nextdesignnow.com/ David Shadle is a User eXperience Evangelist at Microsoft in Redmond and maintains a great set of resources for all the different presentation technologies. I have started to work my way through some of the links and there...

He is me. I thought it was worthwhile doing a very quick introduction to give some context to this blog and what I do at Microsoft. I've been at Microsoft 3 years now and worked on academic programs during that time. This has given me amazing opportunities...

...not really! But wouldn't life be a whole lot more interesting if they were. Thankfully the kind of bot that I am talking about sits safely inside the CLR and tells you things you want to know like train timetables and Encarta questions. Ian Moulster...