Cool Client Stuff

After 4½ wonderful years here at Microsoft, I have decided it is time for a change, and am going to pursue my career outside the company. This was a tough decision, since Microsoft is a great company to work for and I have learnt a lot here, had great...

Andy Edmonds has an excellent post up on the Live Search blog about the new LinkFromDomain operator offered by Live Search, and how you can use it and other search operators to craft interesting and useful Search Macros . As Andy explains, the LinkFromDomain...

As some of you must have noticed, the new Live Search shipped a couple of weeks back, and last week, became the service that replaces what used to be MSN Search as well. The new service offers a bunch of improvements and new features over both MSN Search...

If you were at MIX'06 or the last PDC, you have probably heard of WPF/E (or WPF/Everywhere), which is a technology to support rendering a subset of XAML cross-platform and cross-browser. Well, here's your chance to find out more about it - Mike Harsh...

In case you missed this announcement - videos of all the MIX06 sessions, including Bill Gates' keynote, have been made available online. If you missed the conference, you may find it interesting to view a few of the sessions. Specifically, here is a link...

Wow, lots of Windows Live related news this week: 1) The live.com team released an update just a few hours ago. Great to see they have addressed some of the top complaints/feature requests! My own favorites are (1) when you issue a search from the...

Great news - it was annouced a couple of days back that Visual Studio Express , originally offered free for one year, will now be free permanently! Haven't heard of Express products before? Read this FAQ . Not only are the Express products free...

I have always felt there is a fundamental distinction between a 'search page' and a 'home page'. A search page should be very fast, have a prominent search box and no other content to distract me from doing my search. A home page, on the other hand, should...

In last Friday's update to Windows Live Search, we released the ability to create and manage your own search macros . Now is your chance to create and show off your own personal search engine! It is very simple to create a macro (you don't need to...

Bill Gates kicked off the MIX 06 conference today in Las Vegas with his keynote. Some of the goodies announced today were a new build of IE7 , the release of Atlas and a new Windows Live developer center . Well, the conference has just started - look...

It turns out very few people are aware of advanced search operators provided by all the major search engines. Fewer still actually bother to use them. However, in certain situations, they tend to be very handy. If I want to find out who is linking...

The Windows Live Search Beta launch yesterday gives me an opportunity to write my first post on search, since moving to the search team back in November. This release has many highlights, including a new UI featuring infinite scroll and a snazzy new...

Wow, first post in a long time, and the first in 2006! Since switching teams back in November, I have been settling down into my new team and was then on vacation for a while, so didn't get a chance to post. Well, we have a bunch of cool stuff coming...

I finally got around to updating my FAQ on the settings feature in .NET 2.0. Look for ' Update: 12/10/2005 ' to identify the new content. The new stuff is mostly some questions frequently asked on forums and internal mailing lists in Microsoft around...

A very common requirement for Windows Forms applications is the ability to 'remember' the location and size of forms when they are closed, so that the next time they are shown, they can be restored to the former position. The Application Settings feature...

Wow, I can't believe it's been nearly 3 months since my last post. Time does fly by. Well, a lot has happened in the interim. We finally closed on the last few remaining bugs in Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0 and this Monday, the products were officially...

If you have used the Windows Forms designer in Visual Studio 2005 enough, chances are you may have occasionally seen a white error screen instead of the design time form. This screen, fondly referred to as WSoD in our team, shows up when error(s) are...

We have been getting lots of feedback on the new Whidbey Settings feature that I have blogged about in the past. Since there are a set of questions many people ask as they begin to delve into the API, I thought it might be useful to post an FAQ that I...

At a recent component vendor dev lab on campus, I ran into Charles Torre of Channel 9 and we spent a few minutes in the Xbox room talking about Whidbey. The video is now up on the Channel 9 site. There are also interviews with some of the component vendors...

[Update: This is a repost of a post I made on Friday 5/6, since the original post was lost due to a problem in the server software. Unfortunately, I don't yet have the comments I received on the original post, but I will reinstate them if/when they are...

Consider the following code: public class MyControl : Control { [ TypeConverter ( typeof (SomePropertyConverter))] public Foo SomeProperty { get { ... } } } [ TypeConverter ( typeof (FooConverter))] public class Foo { ... }...

When you author a new component for .NET for which you want to offer a smooth user experience within the Visual Studio designers, you may find you need to write a few more classes to get it working the way you want. For example, you may need to write...

One of the first posts I made, after starting this blog, was about WinRes , a UI localization tool that ships with the .NET Framework SDK. The reason I wrote that post was that I had been increasing noticing how many people had the same set of issues...

This is another of those links that you simply must add to your favorites if you develop using .NET. This page tells you when not to use that other very handy website - PInvoke.net . So before you go the p/invoke route, make sure there isn't already a...

Good to see that Soma's keynote at VSLive! San Francisco brings the concept of 'smart client' back in focus. This is something I am personally passionate about and it is also the theme of this blog. Here is Soma's blog post on the topic and you can view...