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...

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...

If you're a reader of this blog, I'm going to take a low-risk gamble and assert that you probably consider yourself a power user. You pride yourself in the responsibility of having full and absolute control over your machine environment and anything that...

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...

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...

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...

User Account Control is, as I mentioned in secret #4 , an important part of the security protection that Windows Vista offers. For any user with administrative credentials, you can always execute a process with full admin rights by right-clicking on the...

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...

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...

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...

The Start menu got a big overhaul in Windows Vista, with a number of significant changes made as a result of usability testing and research. One of the nicest innovations to my mind is the search bar at the bottom, which searches through your programs...

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...

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...

As many of us move forward from Windows XP or prior beta versions of Windows Vista to the final RTM version, I thought this little tip / secret might be in order. You may be aware that Windows Vista includes a number of different ways to upgrade a computer...

In this article, I'll describe how to use the Windows Media Format SDK to access the metadata embedded in Windows Media files for cataloguing purposes. Also included is two managed classes written in C# that vastly simplify the usage of this SDK. Download...

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...

Deploying Silverlight content to a production web server is a pretty easy process. Despite occasional misconception, Silverlight doesn't require a Microsoft-based web server: Apache can host up Silverlight content just as happily as IIS. But there's one...

Just wanted to take a moment to highlight Mike Swanson’s amazing theme pack for Windows 7. Mike is a colleague, friend who works just down the corridor from me. His primary role with the company is as a content owner for our developer conferences (he...

If there's one thing that puts me off an application, it's when it unnecessarily inserts itself into the Windows startup process so that it can have its very own system tray icon from whence it can spam me with annoying messages. Obviously it makes sense...

If you're building a 3D application using Windows Presentation Foundation, you'll find these links handy: Firstly, Daniel Lehenbauer shares the trackball implementation that we use internally in almost all of our 3D demos for using the mouse to...

Although we're all too proud to admit it, I doubt there's anyone reading this who doesn't love to while away the odd bit of free time perusing sites like YouTube and break.com for funny videos of stupid people doing dangerous things. However, there are...

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...

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...

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...