This time around we want to know about your favourite / most used Visual Studio add-in. I can’t include them all so if your favourite isn’t here, be sure to add a comment to this post to let the world know. Otherwise, Visual Studio extensions, prepare...

If you’ve looked at Windows Phone 7 development, you’ll almost certainly have come across push notifications , a mechanism for efficiently delivering messages to a device whether or not your application is currently running. The architecture looks like...

Clearly I'm missing something obvious here but last night's episode of Dragons' Den when everyone wanted to save the planet with a standby saver has me troubled... The Standby Saver (or whatever it was called) claims to save the (significant amount of...

Richard Costall and Pete McGann (sorry, no link) of NxtGenUG have just released a beta version of the classic ZX Spectrum platform game "Manic Miner" . While I've obviously heard of Manic Miner (I've not been living in a cave all these years...

As requested, it's probably easiest to create and maintain an index post and link to that from all the posts so here goes: Building ASP.NET AJAX Controls (Pt 1) Building ASP.NET AJAX Controls (Pt 2 - Components) Building ASP.NET AJAX Controls...

This one goes out to Vicky Smalley who posted a comment about MSDN Event: Microsoft’s Web Platform. IIS7 and ASP.NET 3.5 . I've packaged up a few examples of the ListView control and the DataPager which you can download from here . I wanted to make them...

This is just beautiful. If you’re anything like me I’m sure you’ve used services like Mailinator for those pesky situations when you *must* supply an email address but you really don’t want to. You know the consequences can be a never-ending barrage of...

I thought it would be fun this time around to try and find out what people’s first experience of computing was. I have no doubt that I’ve missed off many machines I could have included so, as a one-off special offer, I’m prepared to add things to the...

When you're working with the Open XML File Format, you often find yourself changing the file extension on a document to .zip so you can have a dig around inside the package. Of course, when you then want to open the document in Word / PowerPoint / Excel...

A chance conversation at the NxtGenUG got me to thinking about whether you could access the ASP.NET Membership service and Profile service from Silverlight managed code. As ASP.NET AJAX allows you to expose these to JavaScript (using JSON serialisation...

I have to confess that I didn't plan to install Live Writer - I was quite happy with blogging from Word (which works really well) - but a couple of people commented on how good it was so I succumbed and tried it out. The instant I saw the "Web Layout...

Mike has all the details . It's a double-edged sword TBH; great technologies, work with lots of smart people inside and outside Microsoft, lots of cool things to do etc, the downside is your colleagues are all caricatures.... Spot who's missing and win...

One of the demos I've been doing at the MSDN Roadshow is to take the new ASP.NET routing capabilities (currently in preview) and show them in isolation from MVC / Dynamic Data. Although the new routing capabilities were developed for the MVC framework...

There are some changes to Deep Zoom in Silverlight 2 Beta 2 including a new XML based file format and the ability to dynamically generate Deep Zoom images by creating your own MultiScaleTileSource . MultiScaleTileSource is an abstract class with one method...

I love the idea of using iconic British images for the Bing homepage. I thought the current one was particularly evocative. That said, I currently have this beautiful image as my Win7 desktop background (in focus and without the text :-)). It was the...

I’ve just noticed we’ve released some information about future updates for Windows Phone 7 including: Copy & Paste Faster app startup / resume Improved Marketplace search (now restricts search to apps / games)   Your device will inform you when...

Codeplex becomes an important part of the framework release cycle. Formal releases on http://www.asp.net while Codeplex hosts the interim work. Codeplex has source code for bits too. New bits pushed to http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet today. Each area also...

Maybe it's just me but every time I come to do this (usually about every 6 months as I build an ASP.NET demo) I run into problems so I thought I'd give an example here so I can use it again in September :-). Imagine I have a page that displays a list...

I received an email question recently from a customer asking how they could dynamically load the LayoutTemplate for a ListView from a UserControl . I banged my head on this one for a while and eventually mailed our internal ASP.NET alias asking if someone...

Tim Heuer's post on SnagIt and PNGOut got me thinking about my own convoluted snapshot process (and also got me investigating PNGOut ). Currently, if I want a high quality screen capture I do the following: PrtScr or Alt-PrtScr depending on whether I...

If you have an MSDN Subscription you can now download Vista SP1 from the subscriber downloads centre . You can find the related announcements on the Windows Vista Blog here and here . You can also download an Overview of Windows Vista SP1 , Notable Changes...

If you have a Windows Phone and you’re on Orange, you’ll hopefully have heard that they’re celebrating the launch of the “Orange Selects” Marketplace with a free app every day for the whole of July. Today for example, you could enjoy Birdsong , the excellent...

“Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.” Benjamin Lee Whorf This week, given our feature article is on a (relatively) new .NET programming language, we’d like to know which is your favourite.

Yesterday saw the much-debated (in the blogosphere at least) milestone of RTM (release to manufacturing) for Windows 7. I like to think of it as a big green button with the word “Go!” on it. More likely it’s a length document requiring sign-off from a...

There's been a lot of talk about Silverlight 1.1 controls ( or the current lack thereof ) so I thought I'd highlight something I stumbled across on Tim's blog which you may find as useful as I did. He's shared a couple of presentation decks in this blog...