After this morning's MIX07 keynote, I am reinvigorated about the power and potential of Silverlight . Here are my favourite moments: Scott Guthrie debugging a Silverlight application's .NET code that was running on a Mac in the Safari browser, changing...

Swag found in my MIX07 Welcome Pack: 1 Silverlight / Mix07 T-Shirt (obligatory) 1 copy Vista Ultimate (cool) 1 copy Expression Studio (double cool!!) 3 coloured "discipline" armbands to identify the like-minded at MIX (Blue=Developer, Green=Business...

I've just returned from the first Microsoft Ireland finals of the Imagine Cup , an annual international student competition hosted by Microsoft. The theme of the Imagine Cup competition this year is "Imagine a world where technology enables a better...

Here's a flock of butterflies, brought to you in XNA, which can soar around their environment with the help of the Wii controller. By tilting and rolling the Wiimote, you can control the flight of the lead butterfly. The rest of the flock sticks...

I'm working on two projects in the evenings: One is an XNA app (no surprises there), and the other is a Live Messenger bot that is going to integrate the DotMSN bot library , WCF, WF, SQL2005 and more. I've been building that second project with the March...

I discovered through a New Scientist magazine article (thanks to Clare ) that Marvin Minsky, a.k.a. "The Father of Artificial Intelligence," has published The Emotion Machine , the sequel to his 1988 masterpiece, The Society of Mind . In Society...

I was excited to see a good friend, Mona, start blogging about her experience running a science center located north of the arctic circle. It's fascinating reading. They're designing interactive exhibits and experiments: everything from visualizing...

That's quite pretty. Here's more on SilverLight , the technology formerly known as WPF/E. "If you'd just shown that logo to me, I wouldn't have thought it was Microsoft." That's pretty high praise, given who it came from...

I received a really nice and unexpected bit of feedback on my NLarge screen magnifier utility , which is a shared-source project available for download on Codeplex. I use NLarge to magnify the screen, make annotations and focus attention during technical...

One of my favourite game designers of all time, Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Psychonauts) once hammered home during a talk at the Game Developers Conference that all games are wish fulfillments . That probably explains why I played a...

I'm a huge fan of XBox Live Achievement Points . (In fact, Siofra uses another term to describe my undying devotion to unlocking achievements in XBox games.) If you don't play XBox 360 online, think of Achievement Points as a "currency of kudos." They...

Bebo: The "closed garden" approach isn't working for me. I already have a place I store photos (Flickr) and a place where I blog (here). I can't say I like Bebo's functionality for either feature any better. Maybe if I had a zillion friends on Bebo it...

I keep hearing that all the cool kids are on social networks like Bebo and MySpace. So I signed up for Bebo and I signed up for MySpace . Now what happens? I also signed up for Twitter , but I just don't get it. Why would anyone want to know what...

I'm curious to hear which developer technologies (both from Microsoft and everyone else) you've checked out recently. As you can see from my blog, I spent a good bit of time last month playing with XNA and was very impressed. I've recently been splitting...