Microsoft - Tags - Shawn Oster

Microsoft Posts

  • Getting Excited for MIX10

    Thursday, February 11, 2010
    MIX is by far my favorite Microsoft event, and not just because it’s in Las Vegas.  It’s the mix of designers and developers, about learning cool stuff and just getting the creative juices flowing.  Whether I’m there in person or just watching the keynote via the web it has a rejuvenating effect on me and gets me excited to make cool stuff. This year I’m also excited for two reasons: first it looks like I’ll get to speak (link to my talk to be posted once it’s on the schedule) and two because as a gadget and code nerd we
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  • Zune.net Now Using Silverlight 3.0

    Tuesday, September 15, 2009

    One criticism we get as a company is that on the day Silverlight 1.0 was launched we didn’t do a massive refactoring of all Microsoft media-based or media-containing sites to use Silverlight.  Since dry humor doesn’t often translate via blog I’m poking some fun at our critics with that statement.  Any technology transition takes time, even one we believe strongly in like Silverlight.  Given skill sets, market requirements and different time-frames it was never that surprising that the previous Zune.net still used Flash.  It just made sense at the time.

    Today is a different story though, today we can count one more site as having come into the Silverlight fold, Zune.net. (This is just an excerpt, click the title for the full post)

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  • Silverlight TreeView Connecting Lines And Blend 3 Support for HierarchicalDataTemplates

    Tuesday, August 25, 2009

    Showing off Blend 3's support for sample data, converting it into hierarchical data, editing the HierarchicalDataTemplate AND adding connecting lines to the Silverlight TreeView using the Silverlight Toolkit July 2009 release's TreeViewExtensions. A lot of goodness packed into one medium sized blog post, with pretty pictures.

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  • Full Disclosure

    Thursday, August 07, 2008
    It's all about the snappy opening line, watch any classic movie from the 40's and you'll realize the importance of the opening line.  If you need some evidence check out 'His Girl Friday', at least the first 20 minutes, for some of what I consider some of the back & forth dialog around.  Of course the classic for lines from the 40's is arguably 'Casablanca' and if you've never seen it you owe it to yourself to watch it with a bottle and some friends, you'll be amazed at how many lines come from just that one movie. The point,
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  • Lame Support for XML Code Snippets Visual Studio 2008

    Wednesday, July 09, 2008
    As I've been working my way through the Silverlight & XAML landscape inside of Visual Studio I've come to realize how much better tools like TextMate, InType & E are at editing straight text.  I was reminded of this today when I was trying to create a simple code snippet for XAML.  I whipped up a quick little snippet and went to use it how I always do, by typing the shortcut then pressing TAB.  Well, I tabbed and nothing happened.  OK, something happened, I got a tab, which I didn't expect at all.  It should have expanded my
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  • Observing Silverlight From a Speeding Car

    Wednesday, June 04, 2008
    I've been putting myself through a crash course on Silverlight\WPF these last few days and here are a few random thoughts.  All of this is after a 60 minute breakneck tour of WPF\Silverlight so I'm more than likely missing a whole bunch of things and probably doing things bass-ackwards but hey, that's why they call it learning. There are three stock layout managers (used for placing controls): Canvas, Stack & Grid.  Where is the CSS-style panel?  If designing web pages has taught us anything it's that the grid quickly gets cumbersome.  Note to self if I get hired at Microsoft:
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