I've seen a lot of talk around VisualState Manager online and it mostly covers button states and so on. What I want to do here in this post is illustrate why VisualState Manager is a handy tool for the average interactive designer out there and how it...

This is a basic example of how to create a "PullDown Menu" using Silverlight and Expression Blend. The Objectives The GUI will have a PullDown Menu (UserControl) under the main outer chrome. It's intended that when a user clicks on the "MainMenu"...

A bit of a personal milestone here, basically we bought a car for the family today. It's a Ford Edge and I think it looks like an angry little " mongrel " of a thing... kind of reminds of this little stocky pit fighting machine for some reason...

Today was a fun road-trip day for me ( I don't get out as much now that I'm in corp so bare with me). As we drove to downtown Seattle to check out what the latest movements are with the Seadragon folks (Deep Zoom) as well as introduce myself to them ...

Napoleon was supposed to have once explained to an inquirer, "There are four types of soldiers. The first are the dumb and lazy. These I make my infantrymen. The second are the smart and energetic. These I make my field commanders. The third type...

By rights you should be answering that question with sites like Silverlight.Net and if you're not getting that answer, my comments and inbox are wide open for your commentary as in the end our goal is to provide less friction as possible to ensuring you...

It's been basically a month since I first moved into my office here on Microsoft campus and I both love and hate it here. Geek Celebrities need their own star path Life on campus can be really fun and it's kind of surreal to be sitting here at lunch...

Gilbert Corrales and I metup last week here at Redmond and he and I were talking to about how I wanted to make use of an EventDispatcher approach to routing events around the code base (the analogy we came up with was "the difference between a cough and...

I've been reading a few comments and questions floating around in the Silverlight ethos around DataBinding and basically the how. The most common examples I've seen usually show the Binding capabilities within XAML but don't really break open the "code...

July 21st Seattle - I'll be speaking at the WebDesign 2008 conference here in Seattle on " Going from Wireframe Zero to UX Hero ". The session is basically going to cover the "How" I guess on what's next after you've made the leap...

Seattle BarCamp is on this Sunday (15th June). I'll be attending and some others from the Silverlight / WPF crew. For more details check out: http://barcamp.org/BarCampSeattle Where Adobe Conference Center, 701 N 34th St., Seattle (Fremont)

You can buy into what makes a brand a brand. You can choose to believe in the halo or the devil appeal to a brand, but ultimately you never truly appreciate software this way. Brands are a fickle thing, some love them, some hate them, both are filled...

Ok, I had way to much fun with that title. SoulSolutions which is based out of my home town, Brisbane Australia has put together a remarkable Deep Zoom + Virtual Earth demo via the Silverlight 2 (b2). He's even showing you how via code! What's remarkable...

The title just rhymes doesn't it?. We launched Beta 2 today and I'm super excited to see this release. It's now in your hands and you do what you will with it, and I'm extremely keen to see what folks get up to with regards to the new changes since Beta...

Today, we announced Silverlight 2 (Beta 2) . Why should you care? well today we are coming through with the goods that we promised at MIX08 firstly. Secondly, you will be able to now Go Live with your Silverlight 2 creations!! (when the beta2 release...

Here's a little Silverlight riff. ".. The only history that is worth a technologists damn is the history we make today.." I get a lot of feedback from all walks of life. I read 1000's of blogs a month and my job is to essentially be a compete...