|
|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » WPF » portfolio (RSS)
-
Kapow! Shazam! Zing! Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet drove in hard with a right hook last week , referencing my recently-returned-from-hiatus series of great WPF applications and asking why Windows Vista didn't have more killer applications. As one of her correspondents notes, and even Wikipedia highlights , the notion of a killer application is both rare and perhaps something that is better observed in hindsight than at the time. Windows XP and Windows 2000 were both great successes, but I can't name any one application that was the tipping point for industry adoption of either. From a development standpoint, the killer application is less relevant than the killer platform. This needs to strike the right balance between feature richness and ease of use, between power and flexibility, between ease of deployment and performance. Can you build an application that takes full advantage of your machine's hardware? Can you build an application that your customers love to use ? Can you create faster, Read More...
|
-
It's time for me to reboot this series that showcases great applications built on WPF. I left it on hiatus for some months because I felt that the point had been well made, but it's probably time to pick it up again, not least because there's a swathe of cool WPF applications out there that a lot of people probably aren't aware of. WPF is picking up steam and gaining growing respect from those who recognize the benefits of a modern UI framework built on top of a powerful runtime and operating system platform, as some of the future examples will demonstrate. There could be no better way to restart the series than to highlight the WPF-based, Windows Vista-exploitative version of Yahoo! Messenger that was finally released into the wild today in the form of a preview release. It's been nearly a year since it was first announced, and Ryan Stewart wasn't the only one to wonder where it had got to. The high-quality application experience starts from the moment you begin the download. The bootstrapper Read More...
|
-
At the start of a new month, it's time for me to unveil a stunning example of how WPF can be used not just for dynamic, immersive user experiences, but also for even mission-critical services like the indexing engine that sits at the heart of Windows Vista. As you know, the role of this engine is to watch files in common directories like the Documents folder and store a keyword cache that can be quickly accessed for search purposes. It turns out that several of the lead developers on the indexing team were interns on the Avalon team in its early prototyping days. Having spent their entire professional career up until that point with WPF, it's not surprising in a way that they saw the data binding innovations in our UI technology as applying across to the file system infrastructure. Under the covers, the indexing service heavily utilizes the FileSystemWatcher class present in the .NET Framework. To avoid undue complexity in the code, there's one single file system watcher, pointing at the Read More...
|
-
From the beautiful city of Zürich in Switzerland comes this great example of how WPF makes data visualization a snap. In the scenario we're looking at here, the airport wanted a way to be able to track and manage flight operations. I'm sure we've all been in the situation of waiting at the airport to collect someone, but not knowing how close they are to getting out of the terminal. Usually all you have to go on is a bank of monitors that shows the flight status as "Landed", which doesn't tell you whether the plane has literally just touched down, is taxiing around the airport, is actually docked at a gate, or is emptying its load of passengers. If you're monitoring the airport operations, this is a business-critical problem: how full are the car parks? Are planes backing up for a particular runway? How many gates are open? In the case of Zürich Airport , they now have a new tool built on WPF that can help answer these questions and more. This application, built as a XAML Browser Application, Read More...
|
-
Let's say for a moment that you're a small business trader that needs to be able to receive payments both over the Internet and as point-of-sale transactions. You need a way to be able to handle expenses, manage accounts receivable and generally keep track of your cashflow. You probably even need a way to handle checks (or maybe you receive cheques if you live outside North America!). If only there were a payments framework that provided all these services. If only they had a WPF interface so that your customers were impressed by the sophisticated system you had! Introducing IP Commerce , with their Payments as a Secure Service (PASS) offering for Windows Vista, built of course on top of the Windows Presentation Foundation. PASS unites a group of partners - including the likes of Chase and PayPal - to provide an integrated service for small businesses to perform all the capabilities mentioned above. The core application is a free download ; it includes a basic Cash Management Center and Read More...
|
-
I'm hoping that by now, you're starting to get a sense for the range and breadth of real-world WPF development that is going on in all parts of the industry. We've just scratched the surface here: there are many hundreds of WPF development projects underway based on statistics from just our ISV early adopter programs . If you've got something cool to show off, why not add it to our WPF wiki ? In the world of ISVs , there are very few that have broader reach than Roxio . Many millions of PCs each year are sold with pre-loaded Roxio software, from some of the largest manufacturers such as Dell and HP. You can imagine that when Roxio bets on a new technology, it's going to get plenty of traction in the marketplace. So it's my great pleasure to note that Roxio have built the core of their next-generation media software using WPF. Roxio Central provides a hub into common tasks like DVD burning, ripping music, backup and archival. The design is a classic example of how WPF is changing the user Read More...
|
-
I've been trying with this series to satisfy the desire we all have for instant gratification by including plenty of applications that you can download and try out with just a couple of clicks. But of course, not every application fits into that category: there's a number of really important WPF applications that have more complex setup needs or are deployed internally within an enterprise. I'm going to highlight a few of these applications through this series: hopefully they'll be interesting to you even if you can't run them locally on your own machine. One customer who stepped up early in the development cycle to adopt WPF is Areva , a multi-billion dollar global enterprise. They needed to build the next generation release of their energy management system, which provides a view into the transmission of electricity between power stations and across the network, and allows operators to analyze current energy output and predict short-term needs. I hardly need to highlight the mission-critical Read More...
|
-
I've been holding off from highlighting the New York Times Reader as one of the applications in my portfolio for a few weeks, even though it clearly is a polished example of how WPF can transform user experience. Today, we can finally reveal one more little secret, with the announcement of three more amazing news reading applications: from the Daily Mail in the UK (owned by Associated Newspapers), forbes.com and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here (owned by Hearst Corporation). From the early days of Avalon (as it was then known), we made a pretty hefty investment in improving the text reading experience. You can see this at every level of the stack: In ClearType, we implemented sub-pixel positioning and y-direction smoothing. Studies done by the University of Texas show that ClearType increases reading speed by 5-7% with no reduction in comprehension. Within the rendering stack, support for OpenType features such as ligatures, contextual alternates, traditional numerals and swashes improve Read More...
|
-
I'm behind on my write-ups of great WPF applications, and they're stacking up. Sorry! The next application I want to feature is one that has real purpose, in that it's being used by medical researchers at the Scripps Institute who are working on potential treatments for cancer. The Collaborative Molecular Environment application is built entirely in WPF by a partner called Interknowlogy, and it provides a way for scientists to analyze the molecular structure of cancer cells and the SARS virus. More important than just analysis though, a clinical researcher can annotate any part of the structure and collaborate with other team members on their findings, since all the annotations are stored on a Sharepoint server that can be accessed over the Internet by any researcher. Now I'll confess, I know very little at all about this industry - I was never very good at biology or chemistry, and so all the terminology of het atoms, backbones and proteins is as lost on me as observable collections and Read More...
|
-
I love this little application: it's a joyous example of how the subtle use of WPF can add greatly to an application experience. NoteScraps is a handy little tool for jotting down little nuggets of unstructured information - when you're on the phone and someone needs to give you a reference number or an email address, when you're just jotting down a short list of to-do items, when you're just scribbling down a quick reminder. You can launch it with a keyboard shortcut or directly from the system tray, and then you simply start typing to create your note. This application is 100% WPF and managed code: you can download a shareware version from their website, or just watch a Camtasia demonstration of how its used. Here are a couple of things that I really like about the way the application is done: The notes are slightly rotated - not enough to make reading awkward, but just enough to add a more casual look to the application; The notes size to content: there's no manual management to be done Read More...
|
-
I wanted to draw attention to this one, because it's such a fun usage of WPF. Each summer, the Solent waters (between the British mainland and the Isle of Wight) are host to a world-class sailing regatta with a thousand boats racing in forty different events. Coordinating this is a challenge: each course varies depending on the class of boat and the weather and tidal conditions at the time of the race. Until very recently, the courses have been designed using a decidedly non-technological approach: the planners would plot waypoints on a map using drawing pins, a corkboard, and pieces of string stretched around the drawing pins to mark out the course. But as the event grew and became more complex, it became harder and harder to plan the courses by hand. And of course, this is where WPF came along, with an application constructed by Simon Middlemiss, who happens to be one of the most active community bloggers on WPF. Simon has blogged extensively on his experiences of developing the application, Read More...
|
-
I'm slightly accelerating the pace of these articles from the planned daily push, simply because there are just so many to cover. From the moment I pushed out the first entry in this series, I started to receive emails from people around the company and even outside Microsoft, telling me about the applications they've been building, which means that my incoming rate is currently exceeding my outgoing rate! So let's talk quickly about TF1 , the most popular television channel in France. They've just released a WPF-based media player for viewing clips and live programmes. Available for download from their LC1 news channel site (registration required), the player has some nice touches: The player uses a windowless model that looks attractive and is more reminiscent of a web page than a standard Windows application; If you click Voir les programmes ("see programmes"), you get a great timeline visualization of what's now and next on the channel; The two information boxes on either side of the Read More...
|
-
Although you may not have heard of them by name, Otto Group are a huge retail conglomerate with €9b of revenues in 2005/6; they own retail outlets like Crate and Barrel in the US as well as catalog companies like Grattan and Freemans in the UK and the eponymous OTTO in Germany. As the second largest online retailer in the world, when OTTO decided they needed a fresh new retail experience, they wanted to set a benchmark for online shopping. The result was their next generation OTTO store application, built using WPF, WCF and CardSpace and available for download today from their website using ClickOnce technologies. I'm so impressed with what they've built: it's a really attractive experience that will undoubtedly result in increased sales and improved customer satisfaction. The first time you load the application, there's a brief wait while it downloads the product catalog and all the image assets. Rather than making you sit and wait while it all comes down, they integrate a short training Read More...
|
-
Many of the applications I'll be highlighting in this series are highly graphically-intensive and media-centric. I thought I'd present a counterpoint early on in this series to highlight that Windows Presentation Foundation is also very capable as a platform for other classes of application. 90 Degree Software are based in the beautiful city of Vancouver in Canada, and have been working with us for some time on a new end-user reporting tool for business data. Those of you who use SQL Server 2005 will probably be familiar with the Reporting Services component (SSRS), which enables developers to create standard reports based on OLTP and OLAP data that can be delivered in electronic or print form. Reports are created in an XML-based format called RDL , typically using Visual Studio as an authoring environment, and are stored, configured and managed using SQL Server Management Studio. If you're an end-user (rather than a developer) who wants to create some standard business reports, you've Read More...
|
-
Enumerating the applications that I'm going to showcase as part of this portfolio on my whiteboard earlier today, I started to panic at what I've just signed myself up for - I've got lots of writing to do over the next week or two! I was quite surprised to see Mary Jo ask where the killer apps are until I realized that she answers her own question within the next few paragraphs - the headline doesn't seem to tally with the body text. One of the applications she mentions in passing is StandOut from Electric Rain, and I wanted to focus on that product for the second instalment of this series. Electric Rain are pretty well known in the Flash industry for their Swift 3D product, which allows you to create pre-rendered 3D animated scenes that you can embed into a SWF file. They're also known more recently for ZAM 3D (a tool with more than a passing similarity to Swift 3D), which allows the creation of 3D scenes that can be exported to XAML for use within a WPF project. But ZAM 3D was just a Read More...
|
|
|
|