Latest Microsoft Blogs

In the last post in this series [ read here ] I added the clock timing logic to the HTML workout timer. The next feature to add is round and interval audio. I want to ring a bell at the beginning and the end of each round, a warning before a change in work state, [...] Read More...

In [ this post ] I introduced an HTML application that I intended to build. I’ve been picking away at the logic (though haven’t gotten to the HTMP “5″ stuff yet) and thought I’d share the milestone. Note that the gray area in the screen shot below is not implemented yet. Here are some of [...] Read More...

More and more developers are starting to think about building applications that have both on-line and off-line features using HTML5. I’ve been giving this some thought and have decided to build one myself. I thought for a while about what sort of application would make for a good showcase. It’s one of the though things [...] Read More...

There is a (not so) particular kind of shape in Orchard: zones. Functionally, zones are places where other shapes can render. There are top-level zones, the ones defined on Layout, where widgets typically go, and there are local zones that can be defined anywhere. These local zones are what you target in placement.info . Creating a zone is easy because it really is just an empty shape. Most themes include a helper for it: Func<dynamic, dynamic> Zone = x => Display(x); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd...

Over the last several months the “new wave” of web standards have been  moving at an accelerated pace, All the popular browsers are pushing the envelope including Microsoft’s own IE9 and the new standard open up exciting new opportunities for developers. Microsoft at large and the ASP.NET and Visual Studio teams are heavily invested in [...] Read More...

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The  Interoperability team recently made available an update to the FileAPI prototype released on HTML5 Labs last month. The File API prototype is based on the evolving W3C specification that provides an API for representing file objects in web applications. This update implements  the changed behavior in File.slice and also includes a minor update to [...] Read More...

One of our goals in Orchard is to make it possible and simple to change and customize the markup and style for everything that gets rendered by the application and its modules. Of course, this is made a lot trickier by our other big requirement of making everything a composition of atomic parts. Yesterday, we brought on site a web developer who is a fan of Drupal and is occasionally using Joomla! and WordPress, in order to get some good feedback after her using Orchard on a project. And that we got. One of the many interesting things she told us had one essential quality though: it was immediately actionable. Here is the idea. This is the generated markup for an HTML widget in Orchard: < article class ="widget-html-widget widget"...

A task that is likely to pop-up oftentimes when customizing an Orchard theme for a project is list rendering. Two types of shapes will typically be at work when rendering a list in Orchard: the summary shape and the list shape. The list shape itself will rarely vary as the semantics of a list pretty much mandate the use of a simple UL/LI decorated with CSS classes. It's so simple in fact that it's not even rendered by a template but by a C# shape method in CoreShapes.cs. The summary shapes can be rendered by templates that are specialized by content type and by display type. That covers most cases of list customization. In a few rare cases though, you'll want to simply take over the rendering of a specific list completely. In my...

These last few weeks I’ve been refraining from starting any deep work on my new Orchard-powered blog because most of what I had in mind involved widgets, which are being built right now. Version 0.8 is just around the corner: the team is just putting the final touches to the new theme engine and to the widget system. In the meantime, there is still some work I could do that I knew would not be throw-away, and that is CSS. My objectives with this new blog is to reflect in design what the content is about and what it is not about. VuLu is about knowledge, science, art and philosophy. It’s not about shiny gadgets, technology or engineering. That of course means I want nothing web 2.0 in here. Good thing as I don’t have much love for rounded corners...