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People often ask me which books I’d recommend on ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, or Silverlight. They’re sometimes taken aback when I reply that I can’t recommend one because I don’t read computer books any more. Which isn’t quite true. I do read computer books every now and then when I’m trying to get the lay of the…

Are you like me and use your Quick Launch Toolbar constantly? There is an undocumented trick where if you press the Windows Key and the number of the item in the Quick Launch bar, Explorer starts that program. For example, in the Quick Launch bar above, Internet Explorer is the third item from the left…

I’ve been heads-down in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh for the past several days. Now that I’ve come up for air, I’d like to share a few tips, tricks, and work-arounds for glitches in the current builds that other developers might find helpful. SILVERLIGHT.JS After you install the July…

The last few weeks have been travel-heavy for me. First there was TechEd in Orlando. Then I was home for a few days before heading to India for a return visit to Microsoft’s Hyderabad campus. The Microsoft campus is a sparkling jewel on the outskirts of the town of Hyderabad. It boasts big beautiful buildings, great cafeterias,…

I made some minor modifications to the MyComix Silverlight viewer. I wasn’t happy with the look of the drop-down info panel, so I crufted up a new design in Expression Blend. I also added a simple animation that allows comic book covers to pop into view (as opposed to simply appearing out of nowhere) once the…

I’ve heard a lot of talk around MIX this week about Silverlight obsoleting WPF. Developers are asking “why would I develop a WPF app when I could do the same thing with Silverlight and have it run in a browser?” I can think of two big reasons why WPF is still relevant: 1) WPF has…

For a couple of years now, I’ve been showing an ASP.NET 2.0 sample app named MyComix to conference audiences and promising that I would make it available for downloading. I finally found the time to clean up the source code, and the app is now live and available for downloading at http://mycomix.training.atmosera.com. MyComix is, first and foremost, a…

The AnimationExtender control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit makes it easy to add animated effects to Web pages. I especially like the fact that you can compose complex animations from simple animations and use <Parallel> and <Sequence> elements to control animation order. Much of AnimationExtender’s magic is found in a file named Animations.js, which…

Vista is quite nice in keeping you from running too many things at elevated rights so you don’t get into trouble. Where things breakdown are when you want to start a particular process with elevated rights from a command line. The RUNAS program does not have any switch to run a program with your user…