It’s great to see Windows 7 Beta finally released to the world! We're very proud of what has been accomplished over the last months; in many ways, it sets a new quality bar for a beta operating system release. Building on top of the Windows Vista foundation...

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...

It is with tremendous pleasure that I can reveal Microsoft Silverlight : our next-generation, cross-platform, cross-browser web client runtime. Silverlight (previously codenamed "WPF/E") is a lightweight subset of XAML for building rich media experiences...

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...

Historically, the 64-bit edition of Windows XP hasn't been a runaway hit. It's not really surprising in many ways: the x64 version was a rather specialist product built off the Windows Server 2003 codebase, which traded a loss of support for a number...

Today I'm excited to announce the public beta availability of a major new release of WPF. Since we shipped .NET Framework 3.5 late last year, the team has been hard at work at a new release that adds many supplemental features, fixes a good number of...

As indicated in a previous post , we're homing in on the launch of Silverlight 1.0, and today marks another milestone with the launch of the first release candidate. Since the beta we released at MIX, we've fixed approximately 2000 bugs and work items...

It's been gratifying to see how much excitement there is out there about Silverlight. We've barely started the engines yet, but we've already had a number of big sites launch their first Silverlight experiences, and of course plenty of stuff underway...

A list of .NET-related blogs written by UK authors. You can download this list in OPML format for use in your favourite RSS aggregator. Richard Acton : TechEd Europe adventures and Smartphone apps Tim Anderson : Freelance journalist (for PCW amongst others...

In a brief departure from my usual ramblings about Windows Presentation Foundation, I wanted to write a couple of technical posts about using new Windows Vista shell features from managed code. To start off, I thought I'd talk about how to add glass to...

It's great to see so many Silverlight-based widgets, samples, demos and applications appearing out there. I spent a happy hour this morning searching around the Internet for examples and samples, and thought I'd aggregate the fruits of my research below...

OK, so you've just decided that WPF is the strategic technology of choice for your next-generation application, and you've taken the opportunity to flatten and reinstall your developer workstation. What should you put on it to create the perfect WPF development...

I know many developers who rely on Virtual PC 2004 these days, both for application compatibility testing purposes and also for beta testing releases of Visual Studio 2005 ("Whidbey") and SQL Server 2005 ("Yukon"). A few colleagues and I have been trying...

In just a couple of weeks, we'll be ready to publish the Release Candidate of Silverlight 1.0 to the web. We're in the final stages of stabilization as we close in on launch; fixing the last few bugs, doing detailed security penetration testing work,...

I'm sure some readers will be interested in the decision making process that we went through to arrive at the name of Silverlight for our new web runtime platform. It was a tough choice; we know that WPF/E was much loved by the community and that acronyms...

A lot of WPF developers know that Visual Studio 2008 will include much better baked-in support for WPF - the "Cider" team have delivered a WPF forms designer, high-quality XAML Intellisense built on top of a XAML language service rather than an XSD, a...

Many of you have seen the New York Times reader application - it was featured as part of the portfolio I've been building up of Great WPF Applications . As I mentioned at the time, the New York Times reader is based on an SDK that we built to allow newspapers...

I've come across the situation on a number of occasions when coding where I've wanted to convert from a string to an enum . In the Media Catalog sample, I resorted to one giant switch statement that has a case block for each string that returns an enum...

Any good politician, regardless of leaning, knows that the language you use to frame a topic is key to how it is perceived. By repeatedly using pejorative terms to describe your own position and that of your opponents, you start to move a debate onto...

I've been holding off from highlighting the New York Times Reader as one of the applications in my portfolio for a few weeks, even though it clearly is a polished example of how WPF can transform user experience. Today, we can finally reveal one more...

I don't know about your workflow as a developer, but I often find myself switching back and forward between an Explorer window and the command shell. For example, sometimes I'm looking around the filesystem for a project that I created a while back and...

Some people have experienced difficulties with activating the Windows Vista builds that we distributed at the PDC. Please accept our apologies for this; there's been a mismatch between the activation servers and the product key that was handed out. It...

It's a slightly strange way to release it, admittedly, but if you're bored with the standard blue, silver and green variants of the Luna theme that ships with Windows XP, you can now download the Royale / Energy Blue theme. This theme originally shipped...

To coincide with the launch of the Silverlight 1.0 Beta, my team has been working hard on a great series of intermediate-level screencasts on Silverlight that are just hitting the wires now. Each video is about five minutes in length, and covers a "how...

Not a huge release this one, but we've just shipped an update for Silverlight 2 that fixes a number of minor bugs that have been reported over the last couple of months. Get it while it's hot, here: Silverlight 2 GDR1 end-user runtime Silverlight...