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My favorite conference is almost upon us. If I’ve been quiet for a little while on my blog, it’s because this has been a crazy busy season for me and my team, as we put all the pieces in place for PDC2008. PDC is Microsoft’s flagship conference, both because of the scale and depth of content, but also because it’s unique as a time when we open up as a company and share almost everything that’s been under wraps for the previous year or so. This year is more significant than most – it’s been three years since the last PDC. That’s a lifetime in the software world – at PDC05, we hadn’t yet shipped Windows Vista, WPF, WCF, PowerShell, Visual Studio 2005 or SQL Server 2005. It’s high time we provided a set of deep, Level 400 developer sessions on new innovations like LINQ, C# 3.0, .NET 3.5SP1, Silverlight and so on. But PDC isn’t primarily about shipping technologies. PDC is always a coming out party for the platform of the future. In the past, we’ve announced everything from .NET to “Longhorn” Read More...
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If you're into any of the technologies that this blog covers, you'll be mad if you miss the Professional Developers Conference this year. It's actually been three years since our last PDC, so we're overdue! I'm really excited about all the things we're going to be covering at the PDC this year: those of you who have attended the conference in the past will know that we only run a PDC when there is major news to share, and we've got some killer content this year. Registration opened yesterday, so now is a good time to get ahead of the crowd. We keep most of the session titles under wraps until the event starts - this is a future-orientated conference, after all. But even from the session abstracts we've posted so far , you'll see sessions that cover the Live Mesh, Internet Explorer 8, Windows 7 (including details on how to program for the multi-touch feature we showed off this week at Walt Mossberg's D conference ), as well as really hardcore deep-dive sessions on topics like the internals Read More...
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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 bugs, offers many performance optimizations, and includes a new streamlined installer for a subset profile of the .NET Framework optimized for client scenarios. This new release will ship as part of .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 later this summer; the beta release is an early preview of these enhancements. In this blog post, I want to provide a broad overview of the new features in this release, focusing on WPF. Download links: Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Beta) .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (Beta) Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions SP1 (Beta) Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 (Beta) Deployment It's been interesting over the last year or two to see the balance between business and consumer applications developed Read More...
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As many people will have noticed, we released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 this week ( read about the notable changes here ). Aside from the inevitable bug fixes and enhancements to support new hardware types, one of the underlying changes is that SP1 brings the Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 codebases together. This is a big deal, but it's surprising how few people have noted it: this is the first time we've ever had a common codebase for Windows that goes all the way from a budget consumer PC right up to a mainframe-class datacenter server. Internally to Microsoft, this makes it easier for us to provide sustained engineering on the product: if we want or need to update a system component, we only have to produce two binaries (x86 and x64) for all languages and product editions. Compare that to the days of Windows XP/2003, when we had maybe 25 different language editions and x86 and x64 variants for both client and server OS releases, and you can see how the testing matrix has become Read More...
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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 little gotcha: web servers are typically configured to only serve up a limited set of known file extensions as static content. That's all well and good, but Silverlight introduces two new file extensions (.xaml for loose XAML files and .xap for the zip-based binary packaging format). As a result, you need to add the MIME types for those file extensions to your web server so that it recognizes Silverlight content appropriately. Here are the MIME types you need to add to the server configuration: Extension MIME Type .xaml application/xaml+xml .xap application/x-silverlight-app That's all you have to do. Unfortunately, it's not possible to provide generic instructions for how to add MIME types, as it varies from server to server, but here are Read More...
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It can be pretty hard to keep everything up-to-date on a developer workstation these days. With so many CTP releases, betas, and service packs, I know I often realize that my own machine is behind in one area or another. One particularly worthwhile update that might have missed your attention over the last couple of weeks is a new release of the Windows SDK , focused on enhancements in the .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008. Amongst other changes, this updated SDK has new documentation that covers all the new classes in WPF 3.5 (e.g. UIElement3D, System.AddIn, LINQ-based data binding), a variety of new samples for common Windows services such as User Account Control, Windows Search, Windows Error Reporting, Speech, and a range of shell APIs. If you've not installed the Windows SDK before, another incentive is a ZIP file containing over 100MB of sample WPF code (check out %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Samples\WPFSamples.zip). After installing Read More...
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I'm going to be "live blogging" the Steve Ballmer keynote this afternoon at this URL. Keep this blog post bookmarked and start hitting "refresh" shortly after the keynote starts at 1pm Pacific / 9pm GMT. Or simply tune in to the webcast ( 750kbps , 300kbps , 100kbps ) and watch it live yourself! 1:04pm - Ray Winninger (my boss!) is on stage to announce MIX09, taking place here at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas between March 18th-20th, 2009. No - registration hasn't opened yet! 1:07pm - Guy Kawasaki and Steve Ballmer are now sitting in comfy chairs, ready for Q&A. 1:08pm - Guy: why do you want to buy Yahoo? Steve: we've shown tenacity around advertising. Search is the killer feature for online advertising. You could say that we're not where we'd like to be, but we're very committed. Yahoo seems to be a way to accelerate that because of the required critical mass. "What's the current state of the offer?" Steve: We've made an offer - that's all I can say! Read More...
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It's not a state secret that we're in the early stages of development for the next version of Windows (given the internal name of Windows '7'). The specifics of what comes next are always the subject of fevered and sometimes inaccurate speculation, but you can be sure that we're not resting on our laurels. Windows is one of the most complex and sophisticated pieces of software in existence, and since it's about the most widely-used piece of software on the planet, it's a pretty exciting project to be working on. I've got a once-in-a-lifetime open position on my team that I'm currently trying to fill - a Technical Evangelist for the next Windows client release. In fact, the Technical Evangelist at this point in time. This is an extremely challenging, high-profile senior role, with tremendous reach and influence across the organization. Not only will you be the first to see what's coming down the pipeline, but you'll actually have an influence in setting the agenda for Windows development. Read More...
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As we plan the next release of Windows (turns out that Windows Vista wasn't the last release of Windows as we know it !), we're trying to better understand how folk are using our deployment and configuration technologies. If you've got twenty minutes to spare and are interested in helping the Windows team understand your experiences in this area, we'd be love to hear your feedback. Here's the full request: The Windows Application Platform product team would like your feedback to make the management and deployment of applications you develop for Windows better. By filling out this survey you will also have the opportunity of winning a $200 credit towards the discounted software at the on-line Microsoft company store (one respondent will be selected at random for the prize). This survey has questions as to how the applications you create are deployed and managed (e.g. installation, stability, performance, etc). Your feedback will help us identify which activities are important to you and Read More...
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Snowball shows "Copy path" and "Open command window here" shortcuts from Windows Vista's explorer . Read More...
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When I am working at home, why doesn't Windows know that I should have a different default printer? Read More...
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Great write up from Ian on UAC and how Windows developers should not turn it off. Read More...
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When I want to know the date, I now just press windowskey + space, which brings the sidebar to the top of the screen and shows me my nice date gadget. With XP, if I recall, I think I used to double click the clock. Read More...
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There has always been a large gap between the games built into Windows and those that you could buy for Windows. I'm impressed with the games in Windows Vista. A major improvement over what we had before! A partial list: FreeCell: sizes to my screen, has sound and better animations...a much better experience. Chess Titans: my son just played this last night...nice 3d interface, helps the user understand what moves are available. The all important feature: undo. Hold Em: This comes as a downloadable Ultimate Extra if you get "Vista Ultimate" edition. ... Without doing a thorough analysis, all the games seem to be able to do: adaptable sizing saving your game automatically, and restarting at the same place sounds, animations - to make the experience more lifelike Feedback Do you have any new favorite games? How about features that the games did? What else would you want to see? Me - I'd want to be able to play Hold 'Em on the network against opponents... Read More...
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