Design

Windows 7 offers a new way of controlling your desktop, managing your windows, and launching applications. The Windows 7 Taskbar is a new application-launching and window-switching mechanism that consolidates the functionalities from previous Windows OS Desktop mechanisms such as Quick Launch,…

Auf der Xtopia und dem Technical Summit war Patrick Baudisch einer unserer Top-Sprecher während der Keynotes. Ich habe mit ihm über seine "Doppel-Rolle" bei Microsoft Research und am Hasso Plattner Institut gesprochen. In diesem Interview spricht er über seine Projekte, seinen Werdegang…

Mike Flasko, ADO.NET Data Services PM, discusses some design work we have been doing around providing support for our #1 customer ask, the ability to ask for the count via the ADO.NET Data Services URI syntax. 

In the latest of the Astoria Design walkthroughs, Pablo Castro, ADO.NET Data Service architect, discusses the vision of introducing sync & offline capabilities into ADO.NET Data Services.  For those folks going to PDC that want to hear more, be sure to attend Pablo's talk…

Die Xtopia ist unterwegs nach Berlin. Das Logo befindet sich gerade auf Roadshow und rührt die Werbetrommel. Was es dabei so alles erlebt, gibt es in diesem Video zu sehen.

For V1 of ADO.NET Data Services (aka Project Astoria) we introduced a process we called Transparent Design.   The point of this was to make sure we got the design of our features out to users early enough so we could get feedback that we could act on.   Here is a couple of…

The Next-Gen PC design competition has been judged and at the top of the stack of very nice entries is this multi-user, multi-interface Napkin PC by Avery Holleman. You can see the rest of the submissions here, last years winners can be found here. Let us know what you think, which ones do you…

If you’ve ever needed to create vector graphics, but your pocketbook came up a little short on the cash needed to purchase Adobe Illustrator, you now have another alternative: Creative Docs .NET. This completely free tool (for personal use) offers a lot of features that will help you make…

Visio is a surprisingly flexible tool, and many designers now use it to create wireframes.  Po-Yan Tsang is a PM on the Visio team responsible for designer-oriented features.  In this interview, she talks about the decision process they use to add new features to Visio, gives some…

Wow, these are nice! The Small Business site is offering some really good looking designer templates for Microsoft Office 2007 as a free download. There are templates for presentations, spreadsheets, invoices, business cards, emails, and newsletters. And if you're using a Mac, you'll be happy to…