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I just posted today's talk at the RIA conference in the World Trade Center, Zurich. Unfortunately it was not recorded, but the slides and the demos' source code is available on my site. The talk went really good, even though the crowd was rather tough :) Trying to "sell" Windows Presentation Foundation, a desktop Windows-only technology, to an audience of web developers, many of them using Java and open source technologies (and even one Adobe employee) sparkled some very interesting discussions. I can't say I convinced everyone (and it was most certainly not my intention), but I think everybody had a really good time. I know for sure that I did! To all those who stayed until the end of my presentation, and even though mine was the last presentation of the day, thank you very much!! To those who couldn't stay, I hope you'll have fun checking the slides and the demos, and contact me if anything is unclear!! Read More...
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I have been in very much stress lately and hardly had time to post, but I don't forget you, dear readers... Anyway, this Thursday, I will be talking in a RIA conference organized by the Internet Briefing group here in Zurich, in the World Trade Center. My talk is titled "Ultra Rich Interactive Applications with WPF" and subtitled "When Silverlight is not enough..." . I think it's going to be an interesting talk (but obviously I am partial) about the major differences between WPF and Silverlight, and the added richness that WPF provides. I am a big fan of Silverlight, but I have to admit that it's nice going back to the amazing power of WPF sometimes, without having to worry about "is that feature even implemented in Silverlight"? The talk takes place between 16:30 and 17:30 in the World Trade Center, Leutschenbachstrasse 95, 8050 Zürich. Hoping to see some of you there, maybe! Read More...
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A WPF ListView is a possible replacement for a datagrid, when it doesn't have to support advanced features like grouping or filtering of rows. If you use a ListView in your WPF application, and set the "View" property of this ListView to be a GridView. A ListView/GridView even supports features like reordering and resizing columns. Unfortunately, it is not possible to define a minimum or maximum width for the columns. Fortunately, it is not really to do this in the code behind. Let's see how. First we need to understand how exactly the resizing of a GridView column works. When a column can be resized, a narrow vertical line appears on the right side of the column. Passing the mouse over this line turns the cursor into a "resize" cursor. To find out what exactly this line is made of, we can use a tool like Snoop , or Mole . These tools display the inner structure of a WPF UI, also known as the Visual Tree. For example, in Mole, we can navigate down to our ListView and display the header Read More...
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What a crazy week that is. I am currently in Seattle for the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional summit, which ended yesterday. I took an additional day in Seattle to meet a few friends and Siemens colleagues, and this morning got an email notifying me that I passed the MCTS exam about WPF that I took back then in December . Because the exam was in beta stage when I took it, Microsoft needed a veeeeeeeery long time to evaluate the replies and check if I met the requirement. Apparently, they also had issues finding volunteers to try the beta exam, so it took even longer than planned. But hey, everything happens when you wait long enough, and as of today I am a Microsoft Certified Professional. Now I want to point again what I wrote in December: I am not quite sure about the value of the MCTS exams. You are not a good developer just because you learn answers by heart. Testing one's knowledge with multiple choice questions is really absurd, especially when it comes to programming. Additionally, Read More...
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The slides and demo source code of my presentation at TechDays last week are available online. You will find: Slides (Powerpoint 2007) Source code (Visual Studio 2008 C#) Download page I hope that these documents will help you in your "quest for WPF". Let me know if you have questions or comments through the blog!! Read More...
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Next week, on Wednesday the 19th and Thursday the 20th of March, the TechDays Switzerland will take place in the St. Jakobshalle in Basel. Apprently, it's sold out and they expect around 2300 people in 5 parallel tracks. Now that's kind of making me nervous, because I will be presenting a session on Thursday the 20th at 9AM! . It's not the first time I'll be talking at a conference, but it's certainly the first time that so many people will attend, so... kind of nervous here : The talk is called "Siemens goes WPF: Lessons learned" (in English, by the way) and is about the experiences that we made between when we introduced WPF in our project in 2006 and now, where we use it intensively in our project. I'll focus on the developer-designer interaction, the MVVM pattern, Blend and Visual Studio working together, and I'll show a demo of a "best practice" application we are using internally. Additionally, I'll talk about some social aspects of WPF (personal note to Nathan: If you still don't Read More...
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Check WindowsClient.net for updates Some parts of the demos are not available yet in the current build - wait for the next beta Compatibility with Silverlight is important Same tools, designers, code, markup... This summer, .NET framework 3.5 service release Improved setup Fuill install available Also client-focused ~30MB install Parts of WCF Parts of LINQ WPF Deployment of application will be simplified MSI, ClickOnce, XBAP MSDN Reader demoed, looks really good. Source code is available Add-In framework demo HTTP requests, can access cookies in XBAPs and also standalone apps WCF support in XBAPs Lots of 3rd party controls available, check Brad Abrams blog New virtualization model "Recycling virtualization" Uses the same UI elements already created Faster than normal UI virtualization Turned off by default --> must be enabled in code Deferred scrolling enables moving the scrollbar but the UI only scrolls when the scrollbar is released Datagrid demo Won't be as powerful as 3rd party datagrids Read More...
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Robbie Ingebretsen: "This is a creative experiment" "We didn't always look into best practices" Talks about the Integrator role. Nathan Dunlap: "Designers should probably use Visual Studio more" "It's a great tool to dive into the code,check the SDK..." Snippets are distributed as a Snippet installer VSI file. Silverlight code snippets WPF code snippets By the way, check Dr WPF's snippets too! To access the Nerd snippets in the code, simply type "nerd". Displays the list of all snippets. Custom Control to display image sequences, provided for free. "ImageSequencer.cs" Propery SourceFolder, points tothe folder containing the sequence of images Snippet "Storyboard" allows to modify values of a storyboard from code. Snippet "Sound player" provides a lightweight way to play sounds. Value converters Provides a default implementation Creating a new custom panel WrapPanel in Silverlight DeepZoom snippet for Silverlight, looks pretty cool! Provides easy zooming into a DeepZoom prepared image. Get Read More...
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Expression Encoder 2 is now a standalone product, not part of Expression Media like before. Download it from the Microsoft Expression 2 website. Live encoding, events, etc... Smart recompression, for example if you just edit some of the video, only the cut will be recompressed. Animations in XAML can be burnt inside the video. Closed captions. Improved Silverlight players, including a video gallery player. More options for interlaced content. .NET object model. Demo New codecs Aspect ratio is easier to set up than in V1 Very cool new "green" video player. Partial rebuild, builds only what is needed (for example only markers in the header, etc...).Much faster than V1 Video player templates parameters Don't start the video when the page is loaded Download on demand of videos Change stretch mode of player (fixed size, fill page, etc...) Play button on the video. "Edit in Blend" feature. Edits a copy of the template. Save changes in Blend, they appear immediately into Encoder. WMV is pretty Read More...
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Some people actually run their apps on Mono on Windows. Miguel de Icaza "They want open source and sharing and that kind of commie stuff" Progression WPF/E at PDC: Cute WPF/E at Mix06: Still cute Silverlight 1.1at Mix07: Awesome "There was no conspiracy between Microsoft and Novell to destroy the web" :) Prototype implemented in 3 weeks, demoed at Remix07 France Microsoft is opening up open source efforts in the company (DLR...) opening up formats and protocols Novell to deliver a 100% compatible Moonlight and to support it on all major Linux distributions/platforms Microsoft to do the Media pack, regression test suites and complete specs This is an open source project so people can contribute if an implementation is not available for a given platform Based on Microsoft DLR (IronPython and IronRuby) Also run C# code on Mono Demo of the Halo3 trailer on a Linux box NB: Current version cannot display media Desklet application runs XAML (and code behind?) on the desktop. "I am thirsty and Read More...
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So last night was the last evening for many (but not for me since I am flying only tomorrow, ha ha), and there was a number of dinners and parties going on. I was lucky to be invited to a great dinner at Zeffirino's thrown by IdentityMine. These dinners are always wonderful occasions to meet and talk to the big players in the field of WPF and Silverlight, designers and developers mixed. Yesterday was not an exception to that rule, with Scott Guthrie, Miguel Icaza (of Moonlight and Mono), Grant Hinkson of Infragistics, Rob Relyea, Karsten Januzsewski (can't believe that I missed you, so sorry about that!), Ryan Stewart of Adobe, and many others that I was really pleased to meet. After that great time, I headed to the 40/40 club for the Together @ Mix party. It was a nice occasion to meet people from other regions than the US, including Switzerland (woo so many Swiss peopleare actually attending that conference), Belgium, Malaysia etc... At this party I ran into Francois Bochatay of Sobees Read More...
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Cynergy.Labs, cool concept of "no touch gesture", with a "pinch" gesture to manipulate objects Challenges with Touch-based interfaces It's ambiguous. You're never sure where the next "touch" is going to be. Dominant hand plays a role in tactile interfaces "Now we can detect the shadow of the finger and know where it will land" Voice is going to be the next big move in user interface "Having a developer and a designer in a room is like having a humidifier and a de-humidifier in the same room" :) Read More...
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Ballmer really knows his facts. First time I see him speak, I find him impressive. Better than last year's keynote with Ozzie, and I would even say better than 2006's keynote with Gates and O'Reilly Read More...
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Ballmer: "Silverlight for iPhone is interesting, we want to have Silverlight everywhere" Ballmer "But I am not sure that Apple will welcome a royaltie-free, open platform running on their phone" Ballmer "All the relevant applications we have on the web will move to Silverlight" Woman from the floor "I love it that there are no bathrooms line here" Q&A from the floor is really going well. Ballmer did the monkey for web developers :) Read More...
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Questions from the audience What about Adobe? Ballmer "Yeah, what about Adobe?" Adobe is a competitor for Silverlight with Flash and Flex Will remain an important company in the business for a long time We will look into supporting them well as an ISV Read More...
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