The USA is only 20th in the world in broadband penetration. (Luxembourg just surpassed us.) Read More......(read more)

Microsoft Silverlight formerly known by its code name "WPF/E" has now been announced... Read More......(read more)

Ok, so I've been quiet, but I can explain it -- I've been working really really hard on Silverlight and today is our big day! Writing live from NAB, but this is big big big -- read about the details on the links below, and stay tuned, this is only part of the fun, keep your eyes on MIX. Sean Alexander Soma And many others will post, but here is the info for now -- stay tuned! MSDN Silverlight info Silverlight community (coming soon) Read More......(read more)

Having been involved in a few of the notably-mediocre names such as "Windows Presentation Foundation" and "Windows Communication Foundation" and the like, I am very excited that we have landed on a good name for our web client platform... Soma introduced Silverlight on his blog earlier tonight and I hear we are in a demo frenzy down at NAB! There is no doubt that Silverlight will become a core part of the .NET platform (I even added a category for it ;-)). This past week I have been getting ready for my Mix talk (which is about.. you guessed it, Silverlight)... I have been spending sometime with some of the cool stuff we announced at NAB.. Expression Media Encoder is a very slick addition to the Expression Suite and while I haven't really explored...(read more)

A ton of great articles and tutorials on working with data in ASP.NET 2.0 applications has been published recently. This post highlights a few of them (including tools like SubSonic and NHibernate): Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0 Tutorial Series Scott Mitchell recently finished writing his multi-part Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0 tutorial series for the www.asp.net site. This tutorial series contains more than 75 data tutorials (and over 750 pages of content!). There are VB and C# versions available for all of the tutorials, and the articles can optionally be downloaded in PDF format. If you haven't read the tutorials yet, I'd highly checking them out here . Below is the table of contents and links to the articles already published: Introduction...(read more)

The first revision to the UpdateControls ASP.NET AJAX server controls package including bug fixes for reported bugs on UpdateHistory and AnimatedUpdatePanel, as well as the addition of another control, UpdateAction. Read More......(read more)

One of the big challenges for the Toolkit has been how to get the community more involved. The way CodePlex works, we only have a limited number of contributors that have checkin and source control rights (CodePlex is aware of this issue and working on a solution). What this means is that there isn't an easy way for general community members to give us fixes for the issues they encounter. Well - Ted & David (two Toolkit devs) crafted a great solution to this problem, now available as a beta. It's a Windows Forms app deployed via ClickOnce so it's a snap to install and use. Just run the tool to pick up source (via the source download on CodePlex), the make your changes. The tool diffs your changes and creates a patch zip file, which you can...(read more)

One of my pet peeves about CSS and HTML standards is sometimes, they aren't overly explicit, and browser vendors pick arbitrary values for things like line height, or margin or padding and the like. Eric Meyer has talked about a reset.css stylesheet that would effectively eliminate those differences and override the browsers value with the ones that you know and you specify. I'm excited to see that he posted a version of it (though reading the comments, it sounds like there will be a few revisions coming) on his blog today. I'd highly recommend checking it out. He based it on the one from the guys at Yahoo! UI , added a few things and tweaked a few others. It's certainly one way to help eliminate those frustrating hair pulling "why isn't this...(read more)

Over the last year we've found and fixed a few ASP.NET 2.0 compilation bugs that people have reported running into. The root cause of these bugs is varied - but the root cause usually is related to having projects structured with particular cross page circular dependencies, and they are often triggered when massive file-changes occurs on the system (for example: an anti-virus program updates all of the timestamps on files at once). Example Error Messages The below error messages are examples of the types of runtime exceptions you might see if you run into one of these compilation issues: Unable to cast object of type 'ASP.masterpage_master' to type 'ASP.masterpage_master'. Or: Could not load file or assembly 'App_Web_e9dbmaj, Version=0.0.0.0,...(read more)

I love the new VS " Defy All Challenges " theme.. One of the thing that gets me up in the morning (ok, more likely staying up at night) is the idea that we are helping development teams across the world create amazingly better solutions to their everyday challenges. I recently shot part of a Red Vs. Blue inspired video about exactly this... I was honored to be in amongst the some real heavy-hitters that I personally respect a ton! Soma , Anders Hejlsberg , Brian Harry , Scott Guthrie and KD Hallman all appear for short segments... Expect to see more soon! Video: Defy All Challenges Mix I'd love to hear what you think... Who do you think landed the best line? Read More......(read more)

Back in December 2006, Microsoft released Expression Web, a designer tool that's a great companion to Visual Web Developer and Visual Studio. You can read about this tool in this earlier blog post that we had made. Since then, we have received a ton of feedback asking why this as well as Expression Blend are not included in MSDN. As a result of this feedback, the Expression team announced last week that both Expression Web and Expression Blend will be available as part of MSDN Premium. We are excited about this announcement and believe that this will be a huge win for web development teams that include both designers and developers. There's already good workflow between the Expression and Visual Studio brands of products and the workflow is...(read more)

The problem is the following... You want to attach a handler to a DOM event but you want some information to remain associated with it. Let's say for example that the handler is a method of an object that makes use of the "this" pointer somewhere in its body (as it should, otherwise it should probably be static). As the API to attach a handler just takes a function pointer, and the "this" pointer is determined by the DOM element that triggered the event, it seems difficult to do. The Microsoft Ajax Library (like almost all Ajax libraries, let's be honest) provides an easy way to work around that. If you call: var myDelegate = Function.createDelegate( this , this .myHandler); then myDelegate will contain a reference to the this.myHandler function...(read more)

Kit just forwarded me some information about a cool set of webcasts covering what is new from the Visual Basic team for developers in Orcas... Check it out, i'd love to hear what you think.. The live series starts April 18th and will continue to the end of May. Come join us for this exciting series direct from the Visual Basic team !! Here's the schedule ( check the VB Developer Center for updates ): Live From Redmond: VB9 - Orcas Overview April 18th, Presented by John Stallo Live From Redmond: VB9 - LINQ Overview April 25th, Presented by Kit George Live From Redmond: VB9 - LINQ to SQL & O/R Designer Deep Dive May 2nd, Presented by Young Joo Live From Redmond: VB9 - Building N-Tier Applications May 9th, Presented by Young Joo Live From Redmond:...(read more)

Intros to my two MIX07 talks: "ASP.NET AJAX Controls with WPF/E" and "AJAX Patterns with ASP.NET AJAX"... Read More......(read more)

I've been following the comments over on the IE blog about Molly's post, particularly the comments of Chris Beall, thacker and steve_web, and I figured I'd post a bit of a follow up to what they were saying and ask for feedback from the community. In the IE7 timeframe, with the connect database open, we took in close to 10,000 bugs. I don't remember the exact number, but it was closer to 10,000 than 5,000. Yes, you read that right. The problem is that realistically, the number of real customer bugs out of that 10,000 submitted was tiny. I'm talking fractionally tiny. So what makes a bad bug. We got bugs that basically said "IE sucks". That was it. No more detail than that. Every bug like that, takes time for someone to look at, triage, resolve,...(read more)

Blaine has two recent posts on the Web Client Software Factory: WCSF Workshop Available on CodePlex Voting early and often results in a planned point release of WCSF with EntLib 3.0 These posts should show that we are listening to the community, and are doing our best to respond to community requests. Read More......(read more)

Tom Hollander has announced that Enterprise Library 3.0 is available . I know the team worked hard on this release, since we were neighbors (team room-wise). I can't wait to get a chance to use the Validation block a bit more. Sure, the Smart Client Software Factory Guidance Package is already using it in the UI layer, but I want to play with it in a few more scenarios. It looks very useful. Then there is the Policy Injection Applicaion Block, which might change how I design a certian cross section of components in the future. I'm excited to take a look at the released bits. Both of these block will probably be used in the next release of the Web Client Software Factory , so keep your eyes open for changes there starting in late May. Now, if...(read more)

Steven Clarke (a usability researcher here at Microsoft) has published a set of very interesting papers discussing the core concepts of framework usability. I thought I'd collect them for your reading pleasure... 1. Dr. Dobbs article on Measuring Api Usability which introduce our approach to measuring API usability. (Updated link from original post ). 2. The Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (volume 17 issue number 4) has an article on the Cognitive Dimensions framework that includes a section on how we apply the framework and the personas at Microsoft. 3. A short paper presented recently at a workshop in Germany on End User Programming. The paper is a briefly describe the three developer personas we design for. [ Associated slide deck...(read more)

Last month I started a series of posts covering some of the new VB and C# language features that are coming as part of the Visual Studio and .NET Framework "Orcas" release. Here are the first two posts in the series: Automatic Properties, Object Initializer and Collection Initializers Extension Methods Today's blog post covers another fundamental new language feature: Lambda Expressions . What are Lambda Expressions? C# 2.0 (which shipped with VS 2005) introduced the concept of anonymous methods, which allow code blocks to be written "in-line" where delegate values are expected. Lambda Expressions provide a more concise, functional syntax for writing anonymous methods. They end up being super useful when writing LINQ query expressions - since...(read more)

SSL enables browsers to communicate with a web-server over a secure channel that prevents eavesdropping, tampering and message forgery. You should always use SSL for login pages where users are entering usernames/passwords, as well as for all other sensitive pages on sites (for example: account pages that show financial or personal information). Configuring SSL on Windows with previous versions of IIS has been a pain. Figuring out how to install and manage a certificate, and then associate it with a web-site, is something I bet most web developers don't know how to enable. The good news is that IIS 7.0 makes it radically easier to configure and enable SSL. IIS 7.0 also now has built-in support for creating "Self Signed Certificates" that enable...(read more)