Tagged: February 2010 Blog Posts

It’s that time again…beginning of a new month!  That means that Smashing Magazine has released their monthly wallpaper pictures again. Not as many St. Patrick’s themed ones as I would have expected.  Here are your March 2010 Windows 7 Theme Packs for the wallpapers though…including all images (note: some ‘without calendar’ images are not provided by the authors) unfiltered. Smashing Magazine March 2010 Windows 7 Theme (calendar) Smashing Magazine March 2010 Windows 7 Theme (no calendar) Smashing Magazine Desktop Wallpaper: March 2010 (original post) For details on these and to see...

This week at Microsoft we are hosting roughly 1,300 of our top community experts around the world in various technical competencies.  For Silverlight, we have about 80% of our group in attendance from all over the world. At the beginning of the year the Silverlight team asked our MVP group to identify the individuals within their group have done a lot for Silverlight community and that they would consider worthy of being named an ‘MVP of the year’ award. First to be clear, ALL of our MVPs are top notch and all have contributed significantly to...

Something has been bugging me lately.  I feel I’ve become complacent.  And I think you have as well.  We all are surrounded by advertising daily.  Whether it be in print, audio or video, it is always near us in everything we do.  You cannot escape it…nobody can escape it. Not even our children. Perhaps this is what is driving my frustration anger.  You see, I have two kids ages 7 and 3.  My daughter (7) is in her second year of elementary school.  My son (3) is in pre-school.  Both are learning various things.  But learning also means questioning…A LOT!  Sometimes as...

If you aren’t aware of the Silverlight Media Framework, you should take a look.  This is a media playback framework for Silverlight that is based off of a lot of best practices from such implementations as the NBC Olympics, Sunday Night Football and others.  It has a lot of features built-in to the framework such as: Logging DVR-style features Fast forward Slow motion Media Markers etc Basic stuff plus some great included features and extensibility points. Missing Features...

Yesterday Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate was available for MSDN subscribers and would be generally available on 10 February 2010 for the public.  This release represents a significant improvement in the overall Visual Studio product and a lot was based on beta tester feedback. Of course, as a Silverlight developer you will be wondering: Can I still develop Silverlight 4 applications with the VS2010 RC? Here’s the simplest form of a FAQ I could provide for you: Q: What was released this week for Visual Studio 2010? A: The Visual Studio...

Here’s how it started… Lisa (my wife) [shouting from office into the kitchen]: Tim, what’s this Amazon charge for $193? Me [thinking what I may have purchased and not remembered]: Um, don’t know…let me look. I then logged into my Amazon account to see what order I may have forgotten.  Surely I didn’t order $200 worth of MP3…that’s ridiculous.  Sure enough nothing was there.  Immediately I’m thinking fraud.  I start freaking out, getting mad, figuring out my revenge scheme on the scammer, etc. Then it hit me: Amazon Web Services account. The Culprit...

A developer asked me this question and while a simple answer, I thought it would be a good quick tip to share for those who may be in similar situations. The scenario is the classic master-details scenario where perhaps you have a grid of data and when a user selects the row, the details are enabled in a form (or perhaps the child of the element) for editing.  Maybe something like this: See you can see the row clearly selected (note: this is using the default DataGrid styling).  But watch what happens when you go to the form to edit: Notice the focus...