of course if you are already a part of the broader .net user group community, you've seen this already.  but if you aren't (shame on you), you should head on over to azgroups.com and look at the event on the 20th of December.  be sure to sign up to the AZGroups mailing list as well for updates and future events. at the phoenix (tempe) installfest, people who are registered and attend will receive a special trial DVD of visual studio that will enable them to get a visual studio 2008 professional licensed copy sent to them as participating in this event...pretty...

i hopped on a plane at 4am this morning to head back to phoenix from seattle.  oddly enough i landed in rain.  what gives phoenix?  actually it is a welcome refresh for me. i was in seattle for the silverlight fire starter event with my comrade mithun.  this was basically a one-day silverlight lovefest.  and the lineup of people was awesome: jesse liberty adam kinney laurence moroney ...

yo, check it.  expression design has released a service pack.  what!?  i know how can that be?  a service pack < 8 months after its release?  i say awesome.  i've been wanting microsoft teams to continue to become more and more agile especially with regards to very helpful features or great improvements of existing features based on user feedback. one such point of feedback that is implemented in expression design is that of xaml generation of the layers and/or complete surface.  you didn't know design can generate xaml?  shame on you.  i did a podcast (you should really subscribe to the...

later tonight, daylight savings time in north america will end, one week later than usual.  you can see some more details on the new DST start/end times on http://www.microsoft.com/time (this is a new URL reference for future references to DST/time zone changes/issues beyond 2007). for a list of microsoft products that might be impacted, see the Product Impact Support page as well as the DST/TZ hot topics page.  make sure your windows mobile devices have the correct information as well or if older, have had the windows mobile patch applied. for developers, visual studio specific information can be found here: ...

some news on the windows live platform front...now you can link your passport live id accounts!  i like a lot of the windows live services, but one that i've struggled with is live id.  not the concept, but rather the implementation.  it is getting incrementally better day by day and this one change in particular made me happy. when passport first came out, most got one.  when messenger came out, you used your passport.  then you could create a passport/live id with your own email account (didn't have to be hotmail.com), then there were some changes and you might have had...

a video screencast that jesse and i collaborated on was just posted.  in the screencast jesse demonstrates the code we did to demonstrate a concept he calls "hypervideo" which is basically leveraging media metadata, and simulating retrieving related data information to display in the experience. this concept is very similar to the experience at HSN.tv of showing "related products" using the metadata being streamed in their experience.  i hope you find it useful and if you have any questions, please let me know! again, my goal is to try to help provide you with relevant information about microsoft web platform technologies like...

i'll be heading to las vegas tomorrow to attend vslive!  i'll be hanging out at the microsoft area in the expo hall during those hours, but will be lurking around the show, hoping to catch scott cate and some of his presentations. if you are in the area, stop on by the booth or grab me in the hall.  got something for channel niners?  i'll have my vid cam, so let's chat :-) you can follow me on twitter (timheuer) or also give me a ring while i'm there (602-405-4567). tags: vslive , scottcate , timheuer , las vegas , microsoft , channel9...

live in the utah area?  join in the code camp fun.  the community there is planning a code camp.  see http://utcodecamp.com for details and information on location/speaking/etc.  It will be at Neumont University in South Jordan, UT! code camps are a great way to learn and participate in community.  it is always free to attend and you will undoubtedly learn something that day.  and if you have something to share, register to present.  the code camps are for everyone...you don't need to be a professional circuit technical presenter to participate...in fact, the best presentations are from "in the trenches" experiences. join the...

mike palermo has decided to start a special interest user group around silverlight!  the first meeting in the arizona area will be at interface technical training on 07-NOV at 6:00 PM.  attendance and participation are both free! please feel free to invite your friends, colleagues, etc and spread the word.  for the first meeting it will be a bit ad-hoc, but i know i'll be there and have volunteered to talk about creating controls, etc.  what do you want to hear about? you can view the other user group schedules as well as get the address for this meeting by visiting the...

i recently wrote about my birthday binge purchases, one of which included an airport extreme.  in addition to the airport, i acquired a matching (in size so it fit right under it) lacie mini hard drive.  the reason for this (and the initial airport purchase) was i'm trying to consolidate some storage without having to have a running "machine" (OS) anywhere.  the airport touted the ability to plugin an external hard drive and share it with everyone. well, i'm happy to report that my other birthday purchases are doing me proud.  the airport and lacie, on the other hand, are quite...

in part 1 of my baseball example concept, i discussed how i was able to re-use some SVG vector art in XAML.  in that screencast i used an SVG file and a PDF file.  it set the stage for the remaining part of my samples here.  to recap, my goal is to show: using vector files for XAML (done), integrating that XAML and html functionality (here) and then to show a "game play" view of the vector art, extracting just the field information. in this part 2 of that goal, i set out to recreate a different user experience for the...

yeah, me too.  the news of the day is that microsoft's developer group is releasing portions of the .net framework base class libraries (bcl) under the microsoft reference license (ms-rl).  in a nutshell the license enables the viewing of the source code, but no modification.  even so a step in the right direction in my opinion.  while it isn't an open source license, this is a part of microsoft's broader shared source initiatives to aid developers in the understanding of the innerworkings of the .net framework. we'll also be introducing capabilities in visual studio 2008 to allow .net developers debugging their...

UPDATE/correction: jeff weber authored the farseer engine, bill ported for silverlight...both did good work!  thanks for the clarification! bill reiss of dr. popper fame (my daughter loves the "bubble game" she calls it), just released the farseer physics engine, which has support for silverlight (1.1) as well. the engine is an easy to use 2D physics engine for XNA and silverlight platforms.  it contains logic for collision, joints, controllers, etc...everything you would need to start a base casual game at least. bill put it out on codeplex as an open source project as well released under the Ms-Pl.  check out some of the...

thanks to those who were able to make it to the pre-launch event for halo 3 in phoenix!  i hope everyone had a great time being the first in the valley (of the sun) to play the halo 3 game and rock out to some guitar hero.  we had about 55 people for the event plus some staffers.  i know the building access was a pain in the arse, so i appreciated your patience getting in the building. we gave away 5 xbox 360 elites, 3 copies of halo 3, guitar hero set, halo 3 watches, flash drives, etc.  everyone was...

remember the gmail style of invites and the days you were trying to find an invite?  you had to wait for someone who knew someone, etc.  maybe those days are over. how about a web 2.0 invite co-op?  that's what my friend scott mcandrew found.  he told me about inviteshare.com and in < 1 minute i registered and instantly got an email with an invite to yahoo! mash, one of the sought after invites (although i'm not sure why) right now.  interesting approach to broker invites among an anonymous network of friends. tags: inviteshare.com , inviteshare , yahoo mash , mash ,...

my birthday happened recently.  i am not a fan of birthdays and i don't know why.  i'm way past any age of getting additional "benefits" or discounts, and not near any age of getting any additional benefits/discounts :-) -- i'm a tweener now i suppose in a different way.  anyhow, i digress. every birthday i seem to get gifts that tie to my hobbies.  in high school i played on the golf team.  i owned about every illegal piece of golf equipment, counters, tee holders, range finders, etc. you could have.  and i wasn't fond of any of them -- people...

i saw over in the township of adam kinney that someone came up with a silverlight version of the sIFR concept. for those who don't know, sIFR (scalable inman flash replacement) in simplest forms is a method for using css to annotate elements of text that you might want replaced with higher-quality/different/pick-your-word-of-choice typography.  it provided a method on sites to essentially say "hey if javascript is enabled and flash is installed, replace this plain text header with some whiz-bang custom font to make the user say ooooooooohhhh yea" or something like that. filipe fortes, who apparently used to work on the wpf...