Developing for Windows

I am posting this on behalf of Ian LeGrow, Partner Group Program Manager here in Windows. As you may have heard, we now have a new Windows 8 app developer blog to help you build Metro style apps on our new Windows 8 platform. In the new blog, we share...

Windows services enable code to run in the background, even if no user is logged on. These background services provide a lot of useful functionality while minimizing interference with the user’s desktop. Services have been around for a long time and have...

Vista introduced two closely related features: Application Restart and Application Recovery . These features are designed to eliminate much of the pain caused by the unexpected termination of your application, whether as a result of an unhandled exception...

Are you still using yellow sticky notes to remember tasks on your to-do list? Did you ever need an easy, light and quick way to manage your to-do list? Well we have a solution for you. Tasks.Show is a simple Windows application that lets you manage your...

It has been a while since I posted anything on the Windows 7 for Developer blog, but it is good to be back. This is about the first of four recipes we are releasing in the upcoming weeks; the others will be about Restart and Recovery, Trigger Start Services...

      The Flashcards.show application has been around for few months now. It is mostly used as a developer’s reference and demo for showing specific and cool Windows 7 features. While the first version of the Flashcards let you create all...

In this blog I will talk about the HTML5 Canvas element and direct pixel manipulation. Since Internet Explorer 9 RC just released this is perfect timing. While canvas direct pixel manipulation was always possible, before RC the performance of it was not...

Hello everyone! Today, I would like to challenge you to touch the future of technology ! We’ve launched the Windows 7 Touch challenge to inspire you to change the world. To compete in this challenge, we are inviting you to leverage Windows Touch and build...

This is not a new topic to be sure, but application responsiveness is a fundamental issue that continues to plague many applications running on the Windows platform. As a developer, I encounter these issues and to some degree I at least understand what...

After reading my previous blog covering how to integrating IE9 pinning APIs with Adobe Flash, some of you may have wondered if the same fit is possible in Microsoft Silverlight. It certainly is! To demonstrate the concept of integrating IE9 Pinning APIs...

As you may know Internet Explorer 9 supports desktop integration using pinning. You can learn about pinning from various resources: great article on MSDN , my Windows Summit presentation , Scott’s blog here and of course great demos on ietestdrive.com...

Hello everyone, in this blog post I will talk about animation using the HTML5 Canvas element. Canvas is an HTML5 element which is available in IE9 and can be used to create very cool animations. IETestDrive.com features numerous Canvas animation examples...

In my last post I described the advantages of incorporating animations into Windows applications and gave an overview of the platform support for creating them. In this post I will dive a little deeper into how to achieve some simple animation effects...

An important aspect of any application is the experience provided to its users. With so many similar applications, the user experience can be a key differentiator between your application and the myriad competitors. One approach to differentiating your...

Developers! Developers! Developers – this time at the Redmond Campus! That’s right, this year the Professional Developers Conference is in Redmond, WA on October 28 th and 29 th 2010. PDC has always been my favorite conference where everyone just gets...

Hello. I’m Scott Seiber. I’d like to introduce myself. I’m a member of the Windows Planning and PC Ecosystem team. I am focused on making sure Windows developers have the information and guidance they need to build great applications and experiences on...

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to drive to Vancouver , Canada and interact with the Windows developer community at Microsoft TechDays Canada 2010 . This is a two-day technical conference covering eight cities across Canada this fall. (You can read more...

Hilo is back – this time with more goodness! Keeping our promise of delivering more Windows 7 developer fun, we bring you the next installment of the Hilo series. We continue building on the first two applications (covered in Chapters 1 thru 11 on this...

So why should you care about power management and energy efficiency? Power management and energy efficiency are issues of growing importance in IT and software development. In simple words, applications whose design considers power management could help...

In June, we announced Project Hilo and promised a set of cool sample applications written in C++. At that time we released the first application in that series. Since then we have been busy publishing some articles that walk you through all the steps...

Hello again! Today, we are very excited to announce the DirectCompute Lecture Series . This video series is intended to provide you with information, tips and insights into developing DirectCompute applications. A component of DirectX, DirectCompute is...

Hi, I’m Aseem Datar. Let me introduce myself: I’m a member of the Windows Product Management team and have been at Microsoft for over 7 years and held various positions in Windows. For the last two and a half years, I have been focused on making sure...

Last update: May 3 rd , 2010 This post is an index to the Windows 7 Taskbar posts and resources. It includes Channel 9 interviews, links to additional content on MSDN, as well as code samples for programming the Windows 7 Taskbar. Our latest addition...

This is not the first time I've written about the Windows API Code Pack, and probably will not be the last time. However, this time I am reaching out to all Windows Developers who create Windows applications using the .NET framework-- this blog post is...

Federated search enables users to search remote data sources from within Windows Explorer. This means that from within Windows Explorer, you can search those Web sites, feeds, and other structured remote data sources that make themselves searchable with...