WOOHOO! Finally we’ve released the Virtual Earth ASP.NET Controls ( Angus , dev.live.com and Live Side have the news).  Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control - CTP Release The control basically makes it much easier to get data from your database onto the map.  Before, it was difficult to do because...

Announcements aplenty at TechEd 2008 in Orlando today.  Somasegar's been writing about his keynote with Bill Gates and Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is shipping this week with a go-live license for production! This means you can legally land apps in production even though it's beta code - I guess this helps...

The BBC and Microsoft are running a developer event in London called Mashed 08 .  It's a free gig and Microsoft has just released its tickets so make sure you register for them soon if you are interested in attending.  The synopsis looks fun: Mashed - it's Hack Day time again and this year...

Well I never.  Having been at the Future of Web Apps conference last year and hearing a "leading" web 2.0 company say they had no idea what Microsoft had in the form of authentication and identity APIs having reeled of options from Google, Yahoo, eBay, Facebook, (insert other web 2.0 company...

I had the pleasure to visit the set of a filming session for a Microsoft advert last month - even got a bit of behind the scene filming done on the making of the advert!  Anyway this week the advert got published and I think the end result is pretty good! Take a look at the "Web Harmony"...

Bill Gates has just announced free developer, designer and server products for Students.  DreamSpark allows students to download Visual Studio, Expression, XNA Game Studio and Windows Server for free.  Here's the Channel 8 interview with Bill. Bill Gates talks about Free Software, Students...

I've talked about IMM (Interactive Media Manager) before - it's software based on SharePoint that helps you manage your digital assets (think companies like the BBC or Sky for example).  If you are developing software that works with IMM you might be interested in the IMM Core Ontology.  This...

If you're a partner or company developing an application that does stuff with Office documents - saving, loading, storing - whatever, then you might want to consider building it with OpenXML built in.  Why would you do this?  Two reasons really.  We're running a competition to find the...

Woah been a busy past couple of weeks.  Been doing Windows Server 2008 events up and down the country and moved apartment so been up to my eyeballs!  Although I didn't move far it was fairly stressful and I'm now left with a weekend of unpacking.  Oh and joy, there was no BT phone line...

I just finished putting together some info for a partner who was interested in learning how and why to develop their applications incorporating Live Services and Virtual Earth etc. I thought you might be interested, so here it is: Virtual Earth Interactive SDK http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk/ Silverlight...

Steve Ballmer announced today two example apps that show off how to put the Live Services we have on offer to use. The apps "Contoso Bicycle Club" and "Contoso University" were developed by two UK Parters, AWS and Conchango in association with Microsoft UK. They incorporate many Live Services some of...

At the recent BI conference that my colleague Ben has been shouting about recently , one of the Keynotes featured SQL Server 2008 and Virtual Earth. Why these two products? Well, because SQL Server 2008 will be featuring new types of data - in particular geographic data. Ted Kummert, VP of Data Platforms...

Want to try Vista? Now you can with these free trials. Here's the news from Dave Kim . Recently we released two images in virtual formats of Windows Vista which will give you a 30 days hands-on experience to play with both a Windows Vista 30-Day Enterprise Edition and Windows Vista with Visual Studio...

From the initial interviews I knew that Microsoft Surface was a Vista PC under the hood and I had my suspicions that the graphics were powered by WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation - the graphics subsystem that is present in .NET 3.0 and Vista). Reading Scott's blog I found these suspicions to be true...

Last time, this event rocked and I would definitely recommend attending if you want to see and hear some impressive speakers talk about cool technology. The agenda is already published here and you can register for the event here . From the looks of it I will try and get along to IIS 7.0, C#3.0. Mobile...

Saving the best to last :-) The Vertigo crew were commissioned by Microsoft to create an app in WPF that showed off some of the technology. What they came up with was a an app that helps build and visualise family trees. Apparently genealogy is the fastest growing hobby in North America! Anyway, they...

Shock horror, but here's some innovation from Microsoft ( back story from comments in this post ). The New York Times Reader which was originally a Vista launch app based on WPF has been ported to Silverlight on the Mac. Now because WPF and Silverlight share the same presentation markup language the...

Some interesting events coming up soon including how to develop applications using Silverlight and Windows Live: Web Design and Development with Silverlight (Formerly Code-Named “WPF/E) and Windows Live: Reading, 16 May 2007 MSDN: Visual Studio “Orcas” & .NET Framework V3.5 Highlights: Reading, 24...

The beta software development kit (SDK) for Windows Home Server was released last week and should make for interesting applications being built atop the server platform for system protection, media sharing, home security and home automation. The SDK consists of The API files for Windows Home Server HomeServer...

To all those who asked and provided feedback, thank you. Your voice has swayed the vote and Expression Web is now available on MSDN Premium subscription. It's a start - Expression Design and Media aren't on there because they aren't related to developer tools. But what about developers who do their own...

Extending Office Live has recently been made easier through the introduction of this web service which provides specific API access to core parts of the platform. There are also many Sharepoint Services APIs to play with via web services but some of these are blocked because of how Office Live works...

Some say that they code in C# whilst they sleep, others say that they eat java beans for kicks. All we know is that they are called the Vista Squad. If you are in the UK and you need a Vista community you can trust and rely on, and noone else can help... Then make sure you come along to their first event...

Stanimir Stoyanov has developed a Sidebar Styler which among other things allows Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) to be run in a Sidebar gadget. What does this mean? Well, WPF is a very rich graphics subsystem with which designers can create stunning looking applications. Up until now, gadgets were...

It's Developer week for Windows Vista on Channel 9 and On10 , the two online Microsoft TV channels for developers and IT Pros. Make sure you check out what's going on over there - it's well worth a look. One that caught my eye was the Windows Vista Diagnostics- Moving closer to a self-healing OS which...

I used Rightmove.co.uk to find my current appartment in Reading and it does a brilliant job of bringing together properties from various estate and letting agents from across the UK. I was pleased to find out ( via Mike Taulty's blog ) that they have started incorporating Virtual Earth into their website...