Jon Galloway

We’d been getting sporadic reports of high CPU usage in Witty (a WPF Twitter client). I’d tried running the application in debug mode for a while and could never get it to occur, but finally I saw it happening while I was running a release build (keep in mind that 53% is indicating that one of my two CPU cores was saturated):

I’ve been running Windows 7 Beta 1 for a week now and really like it. But I’d been looking at desktop for a few days before someone pointed out the little “desktop Easter egg”.

While working on the PDC2008 website, we had several time-critical updates. There were some announcements that needed to go live on the website at specific times to coincide with other marketing, there were updates to the list of of software being given to attendees that needed to go live right after the keynotes in which they were announced, etc. While some of the site ran on RSS feeds, on some pages we needed the flexibility of static HTML and CSS. While there were plenty of times where I made that sort of deployment by hitting upload in Filezilla at just the right time, there were other times where that wasn’t possible.

I was testing out some typography with Silverlight and figured I’d try grab some text from Wikipedia. I started with the naive approach:

I had the privilege of working on the MicrosoftPDC.com website as lead developer for the past several months. The process hasn’t been kind to my blogging schedule lately, but the experience definitely taught me quite a bit: working with the top-notch Microsoft developer evangelism team, setting up a site for maximum flexibility, setting up the Silverlight experience, and troubleshooting some interesting issues during the conference. I’m going to run through several of these at a high level and may dig into some of these in more detail later (so comment if you want to hear more about something).

When Google Chrome first came out and I read that it used Webkit, the same rendering engine that powers Safari, I tried browsing a few Silverlight 2 sites. It kind of worked, as long as the sites didn’t exclude browsers that weren’t on Microsoft’s official Silverlight support list. The controls loaded, but didn’t animate or update smoothly. While Microsoft still isn’t officially supporting Silverlight on Chrome, Chrome’s latest Dev Build (0.2.151.2) includes some specific fixes to support Silverlight 2 Beta 2. The information about the updates is in the release notes, specifically revision 1735: