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...

Wow the innovation keeps on happening ( back story to lack of MS Innovation)... today via the Virtual Earth blog I found a rather cool video which shows off the work of the MS Research team that are doing stuff with HD Photos that size up to 4 Gigapixels and more! Looks like there are some cool partners...

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...

It was only a matter of time...... I first heard about Electric Rain at the launch event for Expression in the UK and the chaps from the product team did their presentation using their software, a very sexy WPF based slide shower called Standout . Now these guys have come up with something which is also...

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...

Light up the Web Silverlight (codename WPF/E) is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash (estimated to be running rich web based experiences on 95% of the world’s PCs and Macs). The goal is to provide the most natural and seamless method with which to design and build rich applications that transcend both...

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...

Andrew Shorten has just created the "Microsoft blog for and about UK Web Agencies". His first post is about getting started with designing rich User Experiences on the Microsoft platform and technologies like WPF, WPF/E, Expression et. al. I've been playing around with Expression for the last couple...

This little blighter slipped out the door on the 2nd and I didn't even realise! Lucky Mike Taulty has got his ear to the ground and spotted the release and also a rather nice Vista environment built with WPF/E. Kind of makes the www.seewindowsvista.com site (which was done in Flash) seem a bit average...

Today at DesignerUtopia I was fortunate enough to sit in on the session delivered by Tjeerd Hoek, User Experience Design Director on Windows Vista. One of the interesting things he talked about was how they collected feedback from families using good or bad smiley faces in system tray where they could...

Robby Ingebretsen from Identity Mine presented at the Microsoft Designer Utopia event today in London and showed off an application they had created - Roxio Studio 9.5 - that shows off the WPF framework and significantly improves the user experience over the previous version of the Roxio app. I like...

Scoble has posted this really nice demo of Expression Web Designer by the product manager. Wayne Smith menions "standards" at least four or five times in the first two minutes - looks like they've put creating compliant web sites at the center of the product. I'm happy, as an ex-web designer, I know...

I just got an email from corp asking me for feedback on the Windows User Interface. It asked me to see what friends, family and colleagues thought about it. I'd thought it would be good to get your input too! Here are the questions they asked: We need your help before November 1 st with a research project...

Something that was demoed a while back at the Mix06 event was the BBC gadget running on Vista. It shows off the Presentation Foundation brilliantly and it's great to see a UK partner like the BBC pioneering Vista through our early adopter program. Check out the demo and then if you're a software developer...

At the moment I'm on training in Paris, learning about advanced .NET & all things code-like. One of the fellow delegates who also works at Microsoft UK is Saqib Shaikh who sits in the Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) group as a developer. One of his main passions is accessibility for computers...

I was recently asked where the best place to get started with WPF is. I automatically directed the person who asked me to the official .NET 3.0 website over here: http://wpf.netfx3.com/ . It's a great resource that will help you understand about the foundation and the possibilities it gives developers...

In my previous life I was a developer. I did a lot of work on web applications which meant I had the joy of working frequently with CSS and spent many wasted hours getting the appearance of applications just right in multiple browsers on different platforms. IE has been heavily criticised in the past...

Have you been testing Vista? Firstly, thankyou - we value your time and effort! Secondly, make sure you let us know about your experience at the Customer Experience Scenario Voting site here: http://windowsbeta.microsoft.com/vista/setup.aspx?e=1 There are a couple of scenarios given where different...

There are some excellent features in Vista that will excite the photographic users among us. Check out Barb Bowman's article to find out what they are and how you can use them to manage your digital image collections more easily and more powerfully than ever before using Windows Vista.

There's a great post over at the Microsoft Photography Blog which describes how Vista manages your photos - in particular how you make changes and edits to your photos. You know, when you rotate, fix red eye, resize & crop - that kind of stuff. Basically, Vista saves a copy of your original photo...

The slideshows have been spruced up in Vista with different styles and types to enjoy your favourite snaps. Furthermore, you can also view videos and photos in the same slideshow - something that wasn't possible in Windows XP. To run the slideshows you need to have a hardware rating of 3.0. To...

I found a really cool video which demonstrates how to control Windows and even play solitaire using speech recognition! Dailymotion blogged video This demo is courtesy of http://www.istartedsomething.com/