Are you a Netflix customer and have a Media Center PC?  Check out what one of our Media Center MVPs re-birthed.  Anthony Park, a Media Center MVP, has regenerated a project from back in 2004 (originally developed by Ryan Hurst) and released MyNetflix v2.1.

I'm not a Media Center nor Netflix user but the user interface is impressive and done very well to look like a part of the overall Media Center experience.  Here's a view of your Netflix queue:

You can see other screenshots of browsing 'top' categories, movie details and he's also now incorporated 'watch now' information as well.

Great work on extending and keeping MyNetflix alive Anthony!

When developing Virtual Earth applications I find myself always having the SDK documents open in the background for reference.  While this isn't a bad practice, I've historically only used them for parameter reference, etc.  I longed for the time that I could get cheater help intellisense for the Virtual Earth API. 

When Visual Studio 2008 came out with Javascript intellisense, I figured the day has come.  But unfortunately, the Javascript intellisense isn't enabled for external (external==not-the-same-app-domain) files.  The thing about the implementation of the Javascript intellisense in VS2008 is that you can just make a reference to a file for the intellisense and it doesn't have to actually be the implemented file.  Make sense?  Probably not. 

My colleague Marc has created a Codeplex project for enabling Virtual Earth intellisense.  Basically he's created a helper Javascript file that you can reference in your project to enable the intellisense.  Note that this does not actually get referenced in your project (meaning, the Javascript file isn't downloaded to your users), but rather just leveraging the VS2008 Javascript intellisense reference scheme to 'trick' the IDE into giving you intellisense for your referenced Virtual Earth API.  This is accomplished because the Javascript reference of the helper file is a design-time only helper...not affecting any true reference to the Virtual Earth control.

Once you do that, you'll get something like this:

Marc did a great job getting a lot up and running with this helper file.  He's recorded a short screencast on how it works to help you understand it a little better.  And if you are interested in helping contribute to the project, please watch the screencast for more information.

Ah, the joys of using non-API APIs :-).  I say that in jest because essentially my first stab at the MSDN search gadget wasn't using any *real* API, but rather just formatting queries correctly and hoping that the format would stay the same.

Well, when you do this you run the risk of things changing.  For MSDN (and TechNet) search, things have changed 3 times now.  Mike Ormond points out that another change breaks the default MSDN gadget that I had created.  He's posted a fix that works for him (until the next change) and should for others.

Thanks Mike for posting the fix!

If you develop Office applications, then hopefully you've seen some of the great improvements for developing Office applications using Visual Studio 2008.  I recently spoke about these at an event in Denver and demonstrated some of the capabilities.

Of the many new features in streamlining the process for creating Office applications, there are two that required some extra hoops.  Now granted they are minor, but if you are doing a lot of Open Office XML and Ribbon customization, it was a bit of a snare to always refer back to other applications and documents for reference.

Well, the Office team has released a set of Power Tools for developers.  There are many more features implemented in the power tools downloads, all detailed in the overview document available at the download.  Two that I thought were helpful utilities were being able to open an Office document (i.e., docx) in Visual Studio and see the contents of the Open Office XML format.  Here's a sample of a document I had readily available opened in VS2008:

From this view I can then double-click on any node in the document and perhaps get the document XML to manipulate on the fly for a mail merge or something else.  Helpful.

The other is for Ribbon customization.  Office allows you to use the icon base of their application if you want to provide images in your add-in for applications.  This is implemented by inputting an "ImageMso" value.  Basically a value from an enumeration of the boat-loads of icons available.  The only really good place to find the information was a random Excel document that had a macro in it to show the icons and values.  With the power tools installation you get a tools window that has them all for you:

When you select an icon, it puts it on the clipboard for you to paste into your property pane.  Sure, it would be even cooler to have this pop-up when in the property field for that value, but I'll take the baby steps here.

As I mentioned, there are other features in the power tools that were released.  There is a great overview document in that download (you can download it separate) to learn about the various add-ons available to Office developers.  Go check out the downloads to see if they will be helpful to you!

Very cool think popped in my RSS reader this morning.  Scott Guthrie (now a corp VP, congrats Scott) put up a first look post at Silverlight 2.  Not just a 'here's what is coming' but an 8-part tutorial as well as he built a sample application trying to leverage and demonstrate various parts of Silverlight 2.

These tutorials should be extremely helpful for those wanting to understand some of the newer concepts brought to Silverlight.  If you haven't done a lot (or any) WPF coding before, some of this should jumpstart your knowledge a bit.

take a look at 'First Look at Silverlight 2.'