Thursday, September 06, 2007 - Posts

• WPF: Blend 2 rocks (3D, XML comments)

  XML comments and Blend It's great to see how Expression Blend V2 improved over V1. One small thing I noted which makes life easier is the preservation of XML comments entered before a XAML element. This allows documenting an element in a ResourceDictionary, and then moving the element in another ResourceDictionary without losing the comments. That's possible in the Resources tab of Blend, on the right. Note however that only the XML comment located immediately before the resource will be moved around. This comment may have more than one line, so it's not an issue, but it's good to know. Note also that using a XML comment to separate sections in your XAML document is still not a good idea, as moving things around will mess the formatting up! WPF 3D in Blend Since I started studying WPF 3D with Charles Petzold's book, I thought it would be interesting to open a 3D XAML file in Blend, and had the great pleasure to discover a whole lot of functionalities I didn't know were there. I didn't play Read More... Posted Thursday, September 06, 2007 4:08 PM from Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) | 0 Comments

• WPF: Charles Petzold "3D programming for Windows"

  Following Charles Petzold's appel on his blog, I sent him an email, and I had the very nice pleasure to get a dedicated copy of his last book " 3D programming for Windows ". The title might be a little misleading, so don't get confused, it's really a WPF 3D book. Since I am always eager to learn something new, and very interesting in discovering this new aspect of WPF, I decided to take a very close look at the book, and also try the examples. It's quite challenging, because I didn't do vector algebra or matrix calculations in quite some time, but I positively loved it in engineer's school, so I am really looking forward to studying this again. The book is very good so far (I just started and read through chapter 1 only), it's very didactic and Mr Petzold is really a great teacher. As usual in is books, he takes care of explaining even the smallest details, so that you understand 3D even if you probably won't write the figures yourself in "real life" (3D, and especially XAML 3D is easier Read More... Posted Thursday, September 06, 2007 4:05 PM from Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) | 0 Comments

• E-Books Are Better Books

  I've always considered the printed book to be an excellent medium for transferring and assimilating information. Consequently I've been baffled in recent years when people have proposed replacing this technological marvel with some clumsy battery-powered device or, even worse, the computer screen. What's the point? An article on the front page of the business section in today's New York Times entitled “Are Books Passé? Web Giants Envision the Next Chapter” (available online here ) has convinced me that I've been wrong. Here's the passage that made me a convert to the new e-book readers: Unlike the dim bulky devices of the past, the new hand-held readers actually improve the quality of the books they display. Works of history explore the past with greater precision; biographies are more penetrating; poetry is more stirring; and mathematics texts are more comprehensible. The process also works with fiction. “Even James Patterson novels now have real depth and vivid three-dimensional characters,” Read More... Posted Thursday, September 06, 2007 1:21 PM from Charles Petzold | 0 Comments Filed under: Satire

• Real-Time Cell-Shading in WPF 3D

  Of course I couldn't mention a technique of possible real-time cell-shading yesterday without actually trying it out. No, I didn't attempt to derive from BitmapEffect . (I'd love to take a crack at BitmapEffect but I simply cannot justify the expenditure of time.) Instead, I tried the RenderTargetBitmap approach. Here's a rough outline: Lay out your Page or Window normally but instead of defining a Viewport3D element, use a Border instead. The Border is perhaps the simplest FrameworkElement derivative that has a Background property. Give the Background property an object of type ImageBrush . Whatever you would have put into your Viewport3D put into a Viewport3DVisual instead. Set the Viewport property of the Viewport3DVisual to the actual size of the Border element. You'll need a handler for the SizeChanged event of the Border to keep this Viewport property updated when the Border size changes. In that same SizeChanged event handler for the Border , create an object of type RenderTargetBitmap Read More... Posted Thursday, September 06, 2007 12:16 PM from Charles Petzold | 0 Comments Filed under: 3D Book

• IdentityMine Ushers in Silverlight 1.0 with Entertainment Tonight

  Today we launched our biggest Silverlight production to date!  It’s the Entertainment Tonight Emmy Mini Site.  I can’t personally take much credit for this, but the guys who worked on it did a fantastic job.  It was a monumental effort, done in a very short amount of time.  For a behind the scenes look of [...] Read More... Posted Thursday, September 06, 2007 12:38 AM from notstatic.com | 0 Comments Filed under: Uncategorized