This morning, Mozilla shared their feelings on IE9 with a post that claims to answer the question, “Is IE9 a modern browser?” While they grudgingly concede that IE9 is “a step in the right direction”, they seem to be operating under a very narrow definition...

The world’s ability to communicate with one another is a key factor in its rapid evolution and economic growth. The Esperanto language was invented last century as a politically neutral language that would foster peace and international understanding...

While my job here at Microsoft consumes much of my waking life, I spend a little of my spare time volunteering with a small charitable organization called HEAL Africa . They do work in the Democratic Republic of Congo healing victims of sexual violence...

At PDC 2000, we rolled out the .NET platform, including a new language called C#. A lot has happened since then! Each release has had a theme – in C# 2 we added generics ; in C# 3 it was LINQ . Most recently in C#  4 with VS2010 we introduced deeper...

The HTML5 family of specifications provide two different models for vector graphics : canvas and SVG . Why have both? What is the difference between them, and how do you use them? It’s important to start by understanding the difference between retained...

MVVM (Model/View/ViewModel) is an architectural pattern that is well-suited for Silverlight and WPF development. It is a variation of the MVC pattern that originated from the development of Expression Blend. At its heart, MVVM imposes three kinds of classes...

Websites are exploding in the quantity of interactivity they contain: over the last few years, they have become fully-fledged applications with functionality and complexity at a level that was previously limited to desktop applications. Scripting Engine...

Browser performance is a multi-dimensional topic: there are eleven different subsystems that taken together can affect the overall performance of a browser: Different browsers may organize their internal implementation differently, but all these elements...

In the last session, focusing on virtual memory, it was noted that there was almost no connection between virtual and physical memory. The only connection is that the system commit limit is the sum of physical memory and the size of the paging file(s...

Fundamentals of Memory Management Windows has both physical and virtual memory. Memory is managed in pages, with processes demanding it as necessary. Memory pages are 4KB in size (both for physical and virtual memory); but you can also allocate memory...

Now that the keynote is over, my formal duties for the event are mostly complete. Lots going on still, and I hope to meet a number of you in person – but I thought I’d take a little downtime and watch a few sessions. Rather than just greedily hoarding...

Yesterday I shared the story of the Steve Ballmer keynote demo that was breaking and the urgent call I got to help figure it out. I left you hanging as to the solution; a few of you posted interesting ideas of what might have gone wrong. But Richard Cooper...

Tomorrow is the start of the PDC , and while I have a quiet moment before the final keynote rehearsals start, I thought I’d share this little story with you. I got an urgent email very early yesterday morning as I was just waking up from a colleague who...

I want to take you on a journey. A journey to a land that is at once both familiar and strange. Step into my time machine and let me take you back to the last decade. Sit down and buckle up! We’re eight months into the new millennium. George W. Bush has...

Love this Hallowe’en card creator from Archetype : Built using Silverlight, it enables you to carve your own pumpkin, add suitably demonic or gremlin-like sound effects using Silverlight’s built-in microphone integration support, and then share the final...

For many developers, the acid test of whether HTML5 is ready for primetime is gaming. Few other scenarios push a technology as far: with demands for low-latency input, intensive rendering of animated graphical content, layered audio, full-screen display...

This is really nicely done – a behind-the-scenes video for the Never Mind the Bullets project I featured a couple of days ago… Making Of: Never Mind the Bullets from Steaw Web Design on Vimeo .

I’m serious. I genuinely think this is the single most exciting open position in Microsoft today. After the release of Internet Explorer 9 beta, nobody should be questioning our commitment to delivering a hardware-accelerated HTML5 platform that can form...

Beyond the work we’ve done to support HTML5 and other standards in Internet Explorer 9, the engineering and design teams also spent a lot of time thinking about how to enable sites to blend in more naturally with the rest of the applications on your system...

An interesting discussion broke out in the comments to the blog post on Never Mind the Bullets during the weekend over my allegedly loose usage of the term HTML5 to describe the site. Here’s the problem: while strictly HTML5 refers to a draft specification...

I wrote in my previous post about the approach we took to the IE9 beta launch : partnering with design agencies and interesting customers to build what we believe are some of the most comprehensive HTML5 reference sites on the web today. Over the course...

About four months before the beta launch of Internet Explorer 9, we sat down to start planning how we would share the work we’d done with developers and our customers at large. We really wanted to show how sites could take advantage of the hardware-accelerated...

It’s been a while – almost exactly a year – since I last wrote an entry for the blog. To tell the truth, I reached a point last summer where I felt as if I’d run out of steam: that I’d run out of new or interesting things to say and I needed to take an...

The PDC is the pinnacle of the Microsoft events calendar as far as I’m concerned: it’s the flagship event for developers, offering the most comprehensive, future-looking, technically deep, densely-packed set of sessions from Microsoft speakers you can...

As everyone must know by now, the Windows 7 Release Candidate is broadly released and available for download from the Windows site . The RC build is essentially our dress rehearsal: we’ve hit feature complete, stabilized the release, followed the active...