Summer's here, and that usually means a bit of a slow-down in the office as folk take off on vacation. It's also a great time for some new skills development and training, and as there's a smorgasbord of WPF and Silverlight-related courses taking place...

The Silverlight 1.1 alpha bits don't currently have much in the way of controls. The infrastructure is there (you can derive from System.Windows.Control, for instance), and we include a few early sample controls (button, slider and so on, including source...

Celso Gomes is an amazing interactive designer working at Microsoft who is responsible for the beautiful sample applications that ship with Expression Blend and did some of the earliest design explorations for Silverlight. Now he's come up with Nibbles...

Viral video sites are everywhere: it seems that everyone has an embarrassing moment or unusual performance that they want to share with the world at large in the hope of becoming the next internet celebrity. All those videos eat up a huge amount of bandwidth...

As we were pretty explicit in declaring at the MIX conference last month, one of the key scenarios for Silverlight 1.0 is delivering rich video experiences. But since the word "rich" is something of a cliché in the web world, I wanted to give a small...

I got wind today of a great hands-on lab that demonstrates the steps needed to create a high-quality user interface for business applications using WPF and Expression Blend. Two engineers from Microsoft Switzerland, Ronnie Saurenmann and Ruihua Jin, have...

In my last post , I promised to provide a more detailed technical explanation of how you can use the .NET capabilities of Silverlight with HTML, allowing full access to the HTML DOM from managed code as well as providing a means for client-side JavaScript...

I wanted to highlight a Silverlight feature that is often overlooked, relating to the way that Silverlight interacts with HTML. Although most people think about Silverlight as a technology for building web-based user interfaces through XAML, it also offers...

Arturo Toledo (one of our ace designers) posted a reminder on an internal email list that lynda.com have heaps of free training on Expression Blend and Expression Design available as screencasts. The Expression Blend material is presented by Lee Brimelow...

Sorry - I temporarily fell off the blogging wagon. It's tough to keep it going - there's always new stuff to blog about, but finding the time to write and polish is more challenging. It's been a busy month with all the follow-up from MIX, a brief vacation...