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As many people will have noticed, we released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 this week ( read about the notable changes here ). Aside from the inevitable bug fixes and enhancements to support new hardware types, one of the underlying changes is that SP1 brings the Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 codebases together. This is a big deal, but it's surprising how few people have noted it: this is the first time we've ever had a common codebase for Windows that goes all the way from a budget consumer PC right up to a mainframe-class datacenter server. Internally to Microsoft, this makes it easier for us to provide sustained engineering on the product: if we want or need to update a system component, we only have to produce two binaries (x86 and x64) for all languages and product editions. Compare that to the days of Windows XP/2003, when we had maybe 25 different language editions and x86 and x64 variants for both client and server OS releases, and you can see how the testing matrix has become Read More...
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I'm going to be "live blogging" the Steve Ballmer keynote this afternoon at this URL. Keep this blog post bookmarked and start hitting "refresh" shortly after the keynote starts at 1pm Pacific / 9pm GMT. Or simply tune in to the webcast ( 750kbps , 300kbps , 100kbps ) and watch it live yourself! 1:04pm - Ray Winninger (my boss!) is on stage to announce MIX09, taking place here at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas between March 18th-20th, 2009. No - registration hasn't opened yet! 1:07pm - Guy Kawasaki and Steve Ballmer are now sitting in comfy chairs, ready for Q&A. 1:08pm - Guy: why do you want to buy Yahoo? Steve: we've shown tenacity around advertising. Search is the killer feature for online advertising. You could say that we're not where we'd like to be, but we're very committed. Yahoo seems to be a way to accelerate that because of the required critical mass. "What's the current state of the offer?" Steve: We've made an offer - that's all I can say! Read More...
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The WPF team at Microsoft is happy to present the first release of the WPF Application Quality Guide. http://windowsclient.net/wpf/white-papers/wpf-app-quality-guide.aspx It’s a guide that upon completion can be a one-stop shop for guidance and best practices to improve product quality and testability for WPF applications. For those who missed the news yesterday, Vista SP1 was released to manufacture for the first set of languages (English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese). See the complete post here Share this post Read More...
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It's not a state secret that we're in the early stages of development for the next version of Windows (given the internal name of Windows '7'). The specifics of what comes next are always the subject of fevered and sometimes inaccurate speculation, but you can be sure that we're not resting on our laurels. Windows is one of the most complex and sophisticated pieces of software in existence, and since it's about the most widely-used piece of software on the planet, it's a pretty exciting project to be working on. I've got a once-in-a-lifetime open position on my team that I'm currently trying to fill - a Technical Evangelist for the next Windows client release. In fact, the Technical Evangelist at this point in time. This is an extremely challenging, high-profile senior role, with tremendous reach and influence across the organization. Not only will you be the first to see what's coming down the pipeline, but you'll actually have an influence in setting the agenda for Windows development. Read More...
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In 3.0, we received a number of queries regarding creating plugins. So in 3.5 we got this in .. :) .. Creating an adding would bsically need the use of 3 dlls - System.Addin, System.Addin.Contract, System.Presentation The basic steps to create the addins involves creating a contract, then create the corresponding views and adapsters for both the host and the addin. So in total you will be creating 5 dlls in addition to the app and the actual addin. Even though this looks a bit overwhelming, its pretty simple. http://blogs.msdn.com/clraddins/ gives more information about creating addins. In order to try out this framework, I added the addin support to blogpad with the host being able to set text in the addins... So the app basically has an addin for a calculator (which can be removed) and an ad at the side... You can try out the code that is attached .. FYI, the ad plugin links to an xbap and this line is commented in code.. You might want to point it to a legit xbap to get this plugin working. Read More...
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Now this is pretty funny... Watch the video that was played at the start of the keynote address at TechEd 2007 Video: Microsoft Back to the Future Share this post Read More...
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Recently, I was trying my hand at creating a simple blog writer. The writer came out pretty nice. The app makes use of a base richEditor control (thanks to Praj ).. After a bit of tweaking it ended up like the above... So the app just makes a simple call in the xaml <custom:RichEditor/> ...tada ... you have it there!!! The next thing is to write to a blog... In this case, the writer is coded to post the entry on blogger, which makes use of the Google data API .. this could easily be changed for other blogs. It also makes use of a Xaml-HTML converter as the string passed needs to be in HTML. For now, its a blog writer - hence, it onluy writes. But it could easily be extended into a full blown Blog client. Do I hear anyone taking it up :) The code is attached .. so have fun with it .. Share this post Read More...
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Unrelated to text, but extremely cool... Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates once talked about putting a PC on every desk. Now Gates is talking about turning the desk itself — or a tabletop — into a computer. Microsoft is set to announce an ambitious new computing category today called "surface computing" to try to make it happen. The initiative, several years in the making, transforms an ordinary tabletop into a translucent, interactive façade. The surface can recognize cellphones, digital cameras, special ID-coded digital dominoes and other physical objects. And it can respond to human touch. Kids can finger-paint digitally. Business travelers can dive into maps and surf the Web without a mouse or keyboard, by using simple touch gestures across the screen. In restaurant settings, you'll be able to order meals and play digital board games. At home, there may be no more fussing with the half-dozen remote controls sitting on your coffee table. That's because the table becomes the remote control. Read More...
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If you have tried creating FileDialogs in WPF, they usually do not blend well into the Vista look. The solution is to use the wrappers provided in the VistaBridge library which is part of the SDK samples. You could include the library dll (around 100k) in your project and then make the simple call to CommonOpenFileDialog/CommonSaveFileDialog ... The other option being to just include the specific classes in the project. CommonSaveFileDialog saveDialog = new CommonSaveFileDialog (); Its that easy!! Share this post Read More...
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We now have a new community site for WPF - WWW.windowsclient.net It gels both the WPF and Windows forms communities and provides for a unified .NET/Windows client community. This effort consolidates the community knowledge - so more power to you guys out there :) Share this post Read More...
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I got a couple of mail regarding the performance tools... The good news is that the Windows SDK which was released a week ago has the updated WPF perf tools. WPFperf.msi comes as part of the SDK. You would have to uninstall previous versions of the msi before installing the updated version. Read More...
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Heard about SilverLight … it was announced today by Microsoft at the National Association of Broadcasters(NAB) conference. So what is it – “ Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web .” ... btw for those of you wondering, this was formerly known as WPF/E... so no more confusion with WPF ... For more info follow the links below: Silverlight Product Site Silverlight Virtual Pressroom Silverlight Community Site Ain't that logo sweet :) Share this post Read More...
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Xbaps are just multiplying by the day... Just came across this interesting xbap which runs VistaSmalltalk sessions. Its got a nice usage of popups. http://vistascript.net/vistascript/vsb/Vsb.xbap Share this post Read More...
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Recently I was trying my hand at a rough image editing scenario and one of the things was changing into gray scale, brightness and so forth. If you have played with .NET 2.0 you get quite a few functions which help in these types of operations and it would be nice shifting Images to Bitmaps and vice versa. As luck would have it, Robert had posted some code on this in the forums. To get the Bitmap you would have to call CopyPixels on the BitmapSource and convert it to a Bitmap- transformedBitmapSource.CopyPixels(bits, stride, 0); unsafe { fixed ( byte * pBits = bits) { IntPtr ptr = new IntPtr (pBits); System.Drawing. Bitmap bitmap = new System.Drawing. Bitmap ( width,height,stride, System.Drawing.Imaging. PixelFormat .Format32bppPArgb,ptr); return bitmap; } } To do the reverse: System.Windows.Media.Imaging. BitmapSource bitmapSource = System.Windows.Interop. Imaging .CreateBitmapSourceFromHBitmap( bitmap.GetHbitmap(), IntPtr .Zero, Int32Rect .Empty, System.Windows.Media.Imaging. BitmapSizeOptions Read More...
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The final release of the VS 2005 update for Windows Vista is now available . This update fixes most of the issues that you may have faced with running Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista. Install Visual Studio 2005, the Service Pack 1 update, and then the Windows Vista update to get a fully-supported developer environment. There's also an interesting interview with Soma (the VP responsible for the Developer Division here) on Microsoft Presspass. The questions are a little soft (the interview is posted on our press relations site, after all!) but it's a good review of where the developer platform is today and the focus areas for the developer tools and platform part of the business. Read More...
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