One of my last passing shots as I left the UK for Redmond was to put forward an idea for producing short nuggets of 5-10 minutes of on-demand technical content. It's my assertion as a developer that most of us love clear, concise, spin-free technical information on practical aspects of .NET development, but the webcast model of hour long...

As a result of overwhelming customer feedback, we've now made the Avalon November CTP available to anyone who wants to get their hands on it, whether or not you've got an MSDN subscription. This is the first release of Avalon that supports Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. It's pretty stable and functional, as far as CTP releases go, and it's...

I've been writing a game recently using Avalon, as part of which I wanted to load and display a number of sprites and other graphical objects. There were two specific problems I wanted to resolve: what was the best way to cache the sprite images for efficient reuse, and how should I store and load the images themselves? In both cases, WinFX...

Once again, Google comes up trumps with an impressive new service: Google Suggest. Think of AutoComplete for web searches, based on what other people have previously searched for, and you're there. (Thanks to Jeremy for the link.)

In the second developer preview release of Longhorn, distributed in May at WinHEC (build 4074), the Avalon team included a whole bunch of new 3D functionality. For the first time, Avalon surfaces could contain not just 2D shapes and brushes, but also 3D meshes that could be rotated, transformed and animated, with custom camera and lighting...

One of the areas that I've seen cause a bit of confusion in the newsgroups and on blogs is the difference between three technologies that will ship with Longhorn: Avalon, XAML and Aero. I wanted to address this quickly in the hope that it helps us all get a little more precise with our terminology: Avalon is the codename for the new graphics...

The documentation is complete and the bits are signed off and uploaded to MSDN Subscriber Downloads. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the first Community Technical Preview release of "Avalon"! Avalon is the new graphics display subsystem that we announced at PDC, which unified documents, graphics, media and user interfaces into a...

I've actually never come across Larry Osterman before, but he's got a whole lifetime of experiences at Microsoft. He joined in 1984 in the heady days of MS-DOS, and has progressed through most of the teams. He has an infectious sense of enthusiasm and of course a crazy number of war stories about Microsoft through the years. Robert Scoble has...

The first of an occasional series exploring life in Redmond from the perspective of a newcomer to the United States. When I posted a blog entry to announce I was leaving the UK subsidiary office of Microsoft to join the Longhorn evangelism team in Redmond, a couple of people mailed me to suggest I write a little bit about my experiences of the...

Ever since the SQLCLR talk at TechEd San Diego, I've been trying to find out some more information on the monitoring options available in SQL Server 2005 for managed assemblies catalogued in the database. Balaji Rathakrishnan (one of the Group Program Managers on the SQL engine team) kindly granted me permission to reproduce some information he...

For various reasons, I've been spending a fair bit of time over the last week or two ramping up my Longhorn development skills; expect to see a few blog entries over the next fortnight or two on the subject as I write up some of my experiences. Some of my early experimentation has been with the Longhorn sidebar. It's not a bad place to start in...

I've written before in my blog about my desire to see us produce better training and education for systems administrators, IT Pros and infrastructure architects on the benefits of the .NET Framework as an application platform. In short, many of the pain points felt by the infrastructure and operation guys - deployment, updating, application...

This entry starts by looking at the new features in Windows Forms 2.0, and then proceeds to describe the migration strategy for existing Windows Forms 1.0 applications that are to be migrated to .NET Framework 2.0. New Windows Forms Controls We've added some new controls to Whidbey: MenuStrip / ToolStrip (for professional toolbars and menus)...

Office Information Bridge Framework (IBF) is a new solution that provides a standardised way for developers to integrate a company data-centric application into Office. IBF includes a means of specifying business entities and relationships between those entities, providing methods to retrieve the data, and creating a task pane for Office that...

MSBuild is the new build system in Visual Studio 2005. It has been built from the ground up in managed code, with scalability, performance and extensibility as core goals. When designing MSBuild, the development team had several different customer audiences that they kept in mind: The Developer - someone who writes and compiles code regularly;...