Latest Microsoft Blogs

Apologies for going dark the last little while, I'm going to do my best to change that again. Lots of stuff going on here that I'm really excited about, but before I get into that, I want to do an unscientific survey. We currently offer developers and designers the following VPC images: XP + SP2 with IE6 XP + SP2 with IE7 We're looking at the next batch now, and I'm curious, if we were to add one more, which of the following would you prefer? Vista with IE7 Vista + SP1 with IE7 Also, if you're a Mac user, and want to see either VPC images compressed with ZIP, or Parallels users, a comment would be appreciated. No promises on these, I just want to understand what is more important to you. Thanks! PEte Read More...

A couple of days ago, I got an email from the guys at DebugBar letting me know that they had just released their Beta1 for Debug Bar 5.0. They've got a pretty good tool bar for doing web design and web development in IE. Their DebugBar adds features like a DOM Inspector, an HTTP Inspector, a JavaScript Console and Inspector, an HTML Validator among other things. It's free for personal use, and the commercial license is easy to obtain. There are a couple of other tools worth pointing out as well Fiddler2 a web debugging proxy written by one of the PM's on the IE team IE Developer Tool Bar the Microsoft IE Developer Toolbar. There's lots of info on it here IE6 and IE7 Virtual PC images Visual Web Developer Express 2008 has great JavaScript debugging...

It's crazy to me that I've been in this new role for just over a year now, in fact, it's just about 13 months. In that time, I've seen IE7 ship, taken on new products like Expression Web and Visual Web Developer, met so many fantastic developers and designers and have had the awesome opportunity to travel all over the place for work. Today, we updated the installation experience to make IE7 available to as many Windows users as possible. As of today, IE7 will no longer require Windows Genuine Advantage validation, and will be available to all Windows XP users. If you're not already running IE7, you can get it from the Internet Explorer home page on Microsoft.com. We've made a few other small tweaks to the UI, including enabling the menu bar...

Whew, I'm back from my 17 day cruise in the Mediterranian and while it's good to be back, I sure missed a lot! I'm still trying to get things sorted, but in the mean time I figured I'd share this little juicy bit with you. Verio is offering free Windows based hosting for anyone who wants it! They don't require a credit card, and the offer is good through January 2010, so you get a good couple of years out of this. The offer is not available online (huh?), so you have to call and deal with a human. And since it's a 1-800 number, that'll make it a bit harder for those outside the USA. In any event, if you want to take advantage of it, call Verio at 1.800.932.7483! And feel free to pass along Read More...

Yep, the internet is on! I think most of the comments I got yesterday all revolved around the fact that I posted all my presentations in PPTX format. I work for Microsoft, and well, I use PowerPoint to create my presentations. I figured most people, even if they didn't have PowerPoint on their machines would at least have the viewer so they could see the slides, but it sounds like quite a few people would rather have a PDF or some other format. So, here you go! TechEd: Top 5 Web Blunders ReMIX: Building Your Own Video Site ReMIX: Implementing Rich UI ReMIX: A Tour Around VS2008 ReMIX: Search Engine Optimization for Rich Media Note that these are stored on my personal website, so I can't guarantee how long they'll last as they're not on an official...

In Amsterdam at ReMIX, I presented "Implementing Rich UI for Web Applications" where I showed how to deliver richly interactive web experiences with animation, video and more using Silverlight and Expression. It was based on a session from MIX07 by Joe Stegman titled " Building Rich Web Experiences using Silverlight and JavaScript for Developers " Read More...

In Amsterdam at ReMIX, I presented "Implementing Rich UI for Web Applications" where I showed how to deliver richly interactive web experiences with animation, video and more using Silverlight and Expression. It was based on a session from MIX07 by Joe Stegman titled " Building Rich Web Experiences using Silverlight and JavaScript for Developers " Read More...

Wow, just wow, that's all I really need to say. MIX07 was insane, an absolute great time, and some fantastic new stuff coming out from Microsoft for the web. So what were the highlights, for me it came down to three things, first the announcements around Silverlight, second was all the great sharing we got to do about IE, and third, was meeting some fantastic people. I didn't really get a chance to blog while I was at MIX this year, which I wish I had, but we were all so busy, attending sessions, hanging out, hearing what you had to say, eating drinking and being merry. IE As Chris mentioned on the IE Blog , we didn't have anything to announce this year at MIX, we were there to listen, and provide some information. Chris's IE session was standing...

While at lunch today, we got on to the conversation of web design and web development resources. I have sitting on my desk at all times, well, unless I'm using them at home: Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook by Dan Cederholm Web Design Index 5 from The Pepin Press I've got a few other books that I keep handy, though I'm noticeably missing an HTML book, and a copy of the W3C CSS 2.1 spec. I've got a few websites that I like to keep an eye on for resources, for example, color charts, HTML escape sequences, and such. What about you, what are your favorite sites/books? What's sitting on your desk? 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...