WPF Team Bloggers

Posts about threading in .NET

Lester's WPF blog — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:49:00 GMT

if you want to know more about Threading, theres a series of posts (in the making) by Sacha Barber on Code Project. This is definitely a good read :) The following are links to the posts: Introduction into threading in .NET Lifecyle Of Threads/Threading Opportunities/Traps Synchronization Thread Pools Threading in UIs (Winforms / WPF / Silverlight) - not yet done The Future Of Threading (Task Parallel Library) - not yet done Share this post Read More......(read more)

Death, Taxes and Latency

Even a chimp can write code — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:55:00 GMT

By the time Silverlight came around, the problems afflicting web applications all round were well known and somewhat well understood. The burden of dealing with network latency, cancellation and errors should not be thrust on every web developer. Platforms have a unique role in abstracting away these problems. However, beyond band-aid solutions, web platforms haven’t provided any effective remedies. With Silverlight we’ve tried to tackle these head on. I wouldn’t say we’ve solved them, but we’re a ways ahead than many others out there in recognizing and fixing issues in this space. Our strategy involves giving fish as well as fishing lessons. Silverlight enforces an asynchronous programming model for just about every latency, cancellation or conflict -afflicted scenario your web app would encounter. We further the mindset that much everything you’re trying to access can be on a remote machine or can take forever to return or can simply fail. This defensive posture is critical. And so whether...(read more)

PDC08

Henry Hahn — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:29:00 GMT

I've participated in several PDC's in the past, mostly as a speaker, but this year I'm helping to do some of the organization. Recently, I've been in a lot of meetings with Mike Swanson , a Technical Evangelist here at Microsoft. Mike is one of the key ring leaders in producing the PDC content. If you were ever interested in how the PDC gets pulled off and some of the thinking that goes into it, check out this video featuring Mike and colleague Jennifer Ritzinger. Read More......(read more)

My Decision Matrix

Mike Swanson's Blog — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:24:00 GMT

Have you ever had to make a decision with too many options or factors to consider all at once? Or perhaps you’d like to be more objective about your choices. Or maybe you need to document your decision to make it more defensible later on (“your honor, this chart shows why Grape Nehi is clearly superior to Orange”). Whatever the reason, you may find that a simple decision matrix is all you need. I’ve been using various forms of my decision matrix to make both personal and professional decisions for as long as I can remember. In recent years, I discovered that my method is very similar to portions of a Kepner-Tregoe Matrix (“KT Matrix”). If you’re interested in a much deeper understanding of their techniques, I wholeheartedly recommend The New Rational Manager by Charles H. Kepner and Benjamin B. Tregoe. It’s a fantastic book. Anyway, I’ve found myself using my decision matrix in more and more situations recently, and people have started asking for copies of the spreadsheet. I re-formatted...(read more)

New Show: Countdown to PDC2008

Mike Swanson's Blog — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 05:43:09 GMT

Jennifer Ritzinger and I have started a new show called Countdown to PDC2008 , and we just published our first episode on Channel 9. We’ve been recording an internal video series (of the same name) for about ten episodes now, and some fellow employees suggested that the format might also work for an external audience. So, we decided to try it, and we’d love your feedback! Specifically, if you have any questions about the conference, or if you’d like to hear about a particular topic on a future show, please add your comment to the post. We’ll do our best to address them. To keep things short, tight, and packed with information, we use an old skool analog kitchen timer. Yes, we know that it runs a bit fast, but you know what? We will abide, and “at the ding, we’re done”…even if we’re in the middle of a word. That way, even if we suck, we won’t suck for long. For astute viewers, the fact that we’re standing up and using a kitchen timer might even make this an Agile show. Okay…I’m just rambling...(read more)

New Blog Admin

WPF Text Blog — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:25:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Chipalo, and I am a program manager on WPF. Unfortunately, Chris is no longer with Microsoft. I wanted to introduce myself because I have taken over his responsibilities and will be maintaining this blog in the future. Read More......(read more)

FlickrViewr Using DevDave’s AnimatingWrapPanel

scorbs » work — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:55:11 GMT

DevDave (Dave Relyea) is a dev lead on the Silverlight team. He just blogged a really slick new animating wrap panel. Read about it here and try out the sample app below. There are a bunch of different “interpolations” that you can choose from, including “back”, “elastic”, and “bounce.” I’ve updated my FlickrViewr to use this [...] Read More......(read more)

Obscure DVD Recommendations

Mike Swanson's Blog — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:34:40 GMT

Okay, "obscure" may be exaggerating a bit; perhaps "less well known" is a better way to describe these DVD picks. Like Helvetica: The Documentary , these aren't your typical Saturday night popcorn popping blockbusters. But if you have an interest in any of these subjects, they're worth checking out. First up is the excellent and extremely comprehensive, BBS: The Documentary by Jason Scott . It took Jason three years and over 200 interviews to assemble the material on the three DVDs included in this package. There's over five-and-a-half hours of content covering topics like the beginning of bulletin board systems, sysops and users, Fidonet, the ANSI Art Scene, hacking, phreaking, anarchy, cracking, and the legal battle over data compression between PKWARE and SEA. Not only did I used to write bulletin board software (for the Atari 800 and Commodore 64), but I ran a few BBS's in my time. If you grew up in this era, or if you've ever been curious about communication systems that pre-date the...(read more)

Composite Application Guidance for WPF 2008

Lester's WPF blog — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:32:00 GMT

Its been some time before my last post. Just catching my breath with a new addition to my family. :) The Composite Application Guidance aka PRISM for WPF 2008 has just been released. For those who havent heard of it : "The Composite Application Guidance for WPF can help you split the development of your WPF client application across multiple development teams, each responsible for the development of a piece of the application, and help you seamlessly compose those pieces together into a client application. The guidance includes a reference implementation, reusable library code (called the Composite Application Library), documentation, quick start tutorials and hands-on labs." For more details/downloads take a look at the project on codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/CompositeWPF Share this post Read More......(read more)

FlickrViewr Updated for Beta2

scorbs » work — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:03:26 GMT

Just a note to say I’ve updated my FlickrViewr for Silverlight Beta2. (All of the controls now use VisualStateManager, too!) Enjoy! (See the original post for more info.) Read More......(read more)

Parts & States Model with VisualStateManager (Part 4 of 4)

scorbs — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:42:23 GMT

Here we are - the final post of our Parts & States Model series for Silverlight 2 controls. Hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far! Today, we’ll go through some general recommendations on how to use the Parts & States model. We’ll also take a look ahead: VisualStateManager on Windows Presentation Foundation and future releases of [...] Read More......(read more)

Parts & States Model with VisualStateManager (Part 3 of 4)

scorbs — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:37:22 GMT

This is the third post in a four part series on Silverlight 2’s Parts & States control model. Last time, you learned how to reskin an existing control using VisualStateManager. In this post, you’ll see how to build up a Parts & States-based custom control. We’ll also explore how you can create more sophisticated visual transitions. VisualStateManager We’ve [...] Read More......(read more)

PDC2008: A Day in the Life #2

Mike Swanson's Blog — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:01:00 GMT

[You can skip to the last two paragraphs if you’d like to offer suggestions] Here we are…one month later with the second post in a series about the PDC2008 Content Owner role. If you don’t know what a Content Owner does, I’d recommend reading PDC2008: A Day in the Life #1 for context. As mentioned in the prior post, one of my responsibilities is to coordinate and drive two meetings each week with many representatives from across Microsoft. The members of this team are critical thinkers who help define, create, and shape the content we’ll present at PDC2008 in October . But how do we select our content? How do we know which sessions make sense and which ones don’t? It probably won’t surprise you to learn that many Microsoft employees have an engineering mind-set, and we tend to want everything defined in terms of an algorithm (yes, I’m guilty too ). But when it comes to content, though we do have many measures and metrics, a bunch of smart people talking and arguing about what makes the...(read more)

Silverlight Carousel and WPF Training Site Ported To Beta 2

Karsten Januszewski — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:11:00 GMT

Both Yet Another Carousel (YAC) and the WPF training site (which uses YAC) have been ported to Silverlight Beta 2. Read More......(read more)

Parts & States Model with VisualStateManager (Part 2 of 4)

scorbs — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:15:08 GMT

This is the second post in a four part series about managing parts & states in Silverlight 2 controls. Today, we’ll put into practice the concepts you learned last time and walk through how to reskin a CheckBox. (If you haven’t already, please be sure to read part 1 of this series.) Note: I’ve shortened the XAML [...] Read More......(read more)