Perhaps the first commonly-used example of an AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) application was Outlook Web Access , which has saved me on more occasions than I can remember. AJAX gives OWA the ability to provide a much richer experience than would...

At TechEd this year, many of the Microsoft Regional Directors recorded short ten minute technical presentations on their favourite technologies. If you've not come across the RDs, they're a smart bunch of independent developers and architects, most of...

Metro is a suite of new document and print infrastructure technologies that are embedded in Longhorn and WinFX. I wrote about Metro in the Avalon Beta 1 RC guide , but in brief Metro provides a standardized ZIP-based document container and open document...

It's a shame that we have to produce an installation guide to help developers get the various required components for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server up and running, but that's one of the vagaries of beta software. It's clear that not everyone is...

http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/

The MSN toolbar is releasing faster than the "Internet lightspeed" that I remember of ten years ago; this is its second release in just a month or so, now including tabbed browsing for IE. It's taken me a long time to love this; I used to hate the...

If you're interested in this blog, you'll probably be interested in reading the blogs of other folks from Microsoft who work directly or indirectly on Avalon. I've been spelunking around in an attempt to come up with a comprehensive Avalon bloggers list...

It's about time that the world of online music downloads expanded to include a greater emphasis on genres other than pop, so I'm surprised and delighted to see this - the BBC is offering Beethoven's complete symphonic works for free download in MP3 format...

We're another milestone closer to the PDC, with the opening of the registration site . If you register before July 15th, the conference fee is $1,695. It's something we don't often make a big deal of, but most people are rarely aware of what a small percentage...

A great quote from one of the customers I'm working with who are building for Avalon... "I do have to say that with our initial SVG development, we were trying to do one cool thing a week. With Avalon, we are doing one to three cool things a day...

I'm surprised not to have seen more buzz in the developer community around InfoCard , which is easily one of the coolest new technologies and an intriguing solution to the problem of federated identity management. The WinFX Beta 1 RC release that we shipped...

"Don't spoil the ship for a ha'porth of tar" "I'm trying to teach grandmother to suck eggs, I know" And then there's polystyrene, stationery cupboard, pushchair, fire brigade and many more... I'm learning what it's like to be an alien in a foreign...

The MSDN article I wrote on Avalon Beta 1 RC has finally gone live. You can download and read the final version here .