Pete Brown

While at PDC09, I met up with Tor Langlo and Robby Ingebretsen who had just built a really cool closet configuration application using WPF and 3D. Think about going to a high-end home store, where the consultant sits down with you and helps configure a walk-in or other type of closet for your…

While on campus for the MVP Summit in February, I had a chance to visit Henry Sowizral over in building 41. Henry Sowizral is a Principal Architect in Microsoft Expression, and he and his team did something really cool: they converted an existing C/C++/MFC application to have a WPF…

In September, I met up on campus with Joel Barsotti. Joel, and the company SpectraCal, have created an awesome WPF application used for analyzing and calibrating various types of displays (computer screens, LCDs in stores etc.) When Joel first told me about the application, I was really excited…

User Experience is important at Microsoft. One place where UX really shines is in Visual Studio, and the tooling and templates for Silverlight. In September, I had the pleasure of catching up with Tsitsi Gora, UX designer at Microsoft. We discussed what it's like to be a designer in developer…

While at PDC09, I met up with Francois Bochatay from Sobees. He showed me an internal build of the Sobees clienst that has a ton of new features, including inline URL previews, Windows 7 integration, support for different social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Myspace, as well as integration…

Folks in the WPF world have long relied on Snoop to figure out what the heck is going on in their applications. Originally written by Pete Blois from the MS Expression team, Snoop provides information about all the elements, and even a slick 3D blown-out view of the visual tree. Cory Plotts has…

Dave Campbell runs the super-popular SilverlightCream. SilverlightCream is the best place to find current and past blog posts related to Silverlight development. I caught up with Dave at MIX10 and asked him what went into putting together this daily list of excellent Silverlight…

One of the more interesting uses for Silverlight is casual gaming. When you add Windows Phone 7 Series into the mix, it becomes even more exciting. At MIX10, I met up with Microsoft MVP and all around cool guy, Richard Costall. He showed me how, with no real changes, he was able to get his…

At the 2010 MVP Summit in Redmond, I met up with the always-fun Microsoft MVP Bruno Sonnino. Bruno has developed a ton of great utilities over the years, including many for PC Mag. In this video, Bruno talks about DiskPie Pro 2, a utility originally written in Delphi and recently rewritten in…

While at MIX10, I met up with Robert Kihm, Director of Product Architecture at Aptify. We talked about how Aptify enables you to create metadata for an application as well as surface the UI, including bindings and validation rules across multiple user interfaces (Silverlight and Windows Forms…