In the spirit of Own Your Words I recently completed importing all 81 articles I published on my “Windows Live Quantum Mechanics” blog on MSDN while I worked at Microsoft in the Windows Live development group (2006-2007). These articles are now archived on my personal web site under the Windows Live Quantum Mechanics category. I’d like to give […]
Starting next Monday, October 4, I will be the latest shiny new employee at BiTKOO! BiTKOO is a small private company doing great things in the identity and authorization management space. After working at Microsoft on Visual Studio extensions for the past 2+ years (Windows Live Mesh app tools, then Visual Studio Tools for Windows […]
I’m pleased to announce that the June 2010 release of Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio is now available for free download! New features in this release: Full support for Visual Studio 2010 RTM .NET 4 support – You can now build your Windows Azure web apps and services using either .NET 3.5 or the […]
I just heard the news announced at PDC that the Managed Extensibility Framework, or MEF, is now slated to be included in Silverlight 4. Great news! I did a bit of proof of concept work using MEF about a year ago. MEF is all about composition of providers and consumers. MEF’s main job is to […]
Mike Wickstrand of the Windows Azure team has created a Windows Azure Feedback Forum to solicit feedback from you about what sorts of things/features/services you would like to see Windows Azure provide. You can enter your own suggestions and vote for the features that you want the most. This feedback will go directly to the […]
Windows Azure, Microsoft’s platform for cloud-based applications, just rolled out a major update to sync with PDC09. We of course also rolled out a major update of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio in the same push. Jim Nakashima and others will be showing our latest tools at PDC09 this week. Windows Azure Tools […]
Microsoft announced today the release of Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 and .NET Framework 4 beta 2! It will be available immediately for download by MSDN subscribers and for general release towards the end of this month. I can’t begin to describe all the stuff that is new and improved in this beta 2, so […]
Amidst the fanfare and excitement of Mix09 this week, we’ve received reports on the discussion forum from a few folks that were having trouble with the Live Framework SDK and Tools April CTP released last week. Here’s an update on that issue. Issue: Visual Studio closes unexpectedly when launching Help: About or when creating or […]
I’m pleased to announce that we have released our April CTP release of the Live Framwork SDK and Tools in preparation for MIX09 next week. For full details see the official announcement on the Live Framework blog, but here are the highlights: You can now run the local client for mesh.com side by side with […]
Congratulations to Miguel de Icaza and his team at Novell for the completion and release of Moonlight 1.0! Moonlight is an open source implementation of Silverlight for the Linux platform developed in a joint effort between Novell and Microsoft. Silverlight was the primary deployment vehicle for live online video coverage of the Olympics last summer, […]
Microsoft’s Live Mesh platform has been nominated for the 2008 Crunchies “Best Technology Innovation/Achievement” award! The winner will be determined by public vote, so get yourself over to http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/votes/ to cast your vote for your favorite technologies of 2008. The Crunchies competition and award ceremony recognizes and celebrates the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations […]

This may be old news to some, but it just popped up on my radar: Ori Amiga, frustrated with the lack of truely usable and connected smart devices in the automotive market, built his own custom touchscreen PC console for his Porsche. It’s a full-on PC running Vista and loaded up with GPS, WiFI, BlueTooth, […]
Dare Obasanjo has written up his characteristically frank first impressions of Live Framework and how it compares to Google’s GData API. It’s a good read: Live Framework (LiveFx): Is It Microsoft’s GData or Something More? Dare closes the article with this: On the flip side, the client-side Live Operating Environment is a technology whose benefits […]
In looking back at yesterday’s post on Windows Azure and Live Framework Tools I suddenly realized I didn’t provide any links to content about the VS tools I work on! Let’s see if we can remedy that… Live Framework SDK and Tools (dev.live.com) Getting Started using the Live Framework Tools (msdn.microsoft.com) Cloud Computing Tools Technology […]
Yesterday at PDC Microsoft unveiled Windows Azure, a new platform for global scale distributed computing services, often called “cloud computing”. Today Microsoft rolled out tools for creating apps that use Live Services, access the same Mesh Objects you see in Live Mesh, or execute in the Windows Azure cloud. Mesh-enabled web applications can even update themselves thanks to Feedsync-enabled Live Services […]
The second major version of Microsoft’s Silverlight web platform, featuring new UI controls and a lot more, has been released. Read all about it in Scott Guthrie’s post.
Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this year sounds like it’s going to be a landmark event. According to tidbits offered on the PDC website, this year’s headliners will be the first peekat Windows 7 (with prebeta DVDs!) as well as Microsoft’s new thrust into the cloud computing space (no disks needed). From the website: Come […]
I’m slowly gaining ground in the war against paper. I’m a packrat, which immediately calls into question the structural integrity of my house and garage. However, I’ve discovered that technology transcends the limitations of corporeal space. I can still hoard precious tidbits for posterity in digital form without risking premature burial under collapsing stacks of […]
There has been a bit of pot-stirring on the blogs this weekend. Dare Obasanjo reflects on recent migrations of Google engineers to Microsoft, using the “e” word (exodus). Dion Almaer fires back, pointing out that people move between companies all the time, hardly justification for the “exodus”. Both are right, and both are wrong. First […]
In getting back up to speed with Silverlight, and in particular the new Silverlight 2 beta 2, I’ve been surfing through the many quickstart topics on various web sites. While skimming “Receiving Plain XML Messages with Silverlight” these words lept out at me: note: The WebClient class does not currently support cross-domain calls. Say what? […]