November 2008 - Mike Taulty's Blog

I've been catching up on my blog reading...interesting stuff I came across; PNRP in Windows 7 being used for "remote assistance" . Sounds very cool. You can find a few PNRP examples on this blog if you search. Seadragon in AJAX from Live Labs - if you've seen DeepZoom in Silverlight then this is the same underlying technology (AFAIK) without the Silverlight part. Themes for WPF released on CodePlex ( a port of the Silverlight versions from the Silverlight Toolkit ). There's also a port of the charts up here . If you've not seen it yet, the WPF Toolkit got rev'd with the toolkit now containing the DataGrid, Calendar and DatePicker and the Ribbon preview being available off the same page. I thought I'd written a post about this but I've just realised it didn't get past the preview stage :-) ScottGu's update on Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 - some of that stuff "surprised" me in terms of what's being revealed here! VS2010 code editor is being drawn with vectors and WPF - Kenny spots it and enjoy vectors :-) Celso...

I wanted to experiment with text animation. Specifically, I wanted a control that would display some text and have the option of "exploding" that text in the sense of taking each word in the text and randomly animating it in terms of; translation rotation scale opacity so that the words that make up the text can seem to "fly in" all at once to their final position on screen. Perhaps a UI will help; Here, my control is in the blue border occupying the bottom 3/4 of the window. Naturally, none of the styling is fixed. The other controls on the Window just provide; Text Whether the control initially displays its text "exploded" or not How long the animation to bring the text into place should take and those controls all data-bind to properties on my control with the TextBox only being set to transfer its value on a loss of focus rather than on every keystroke. When I hit (in this case) the Implode button there'll be a 5 second animation which does; to bring the words into place and (naturally) Explode just does the...

I'm not a big gamer. I hadn't turned my Xbox on for about 3 months before I recently bought Far Cry 2 which I'm playing through and really enjoying. I'm also thinking of Mirror's Edge as I played a preview of that and it looks really cool. However...today is the launch of the New Xbox Experience which looks pretty cool and has one particular feature that sounds very attractive to me - the ability to install a DVD based game to the hard-drive. I really want to try that out - with the best will in the world, the Xbox DVD drive ( like most DVD drives ) makes a lot of noise and so I'd expect that a game coming from the hard-drive would be a lot quicker and a lot quieter. Hopefully, I'll get to give the NXE a whirl later today :-)

Following on from this previous post there's a few things wrong with where I've got to so far and some improvements that I'd like to make; I'd like to display something when there's no new feed items available. I'd like some kind of transition when one feed item moves to another. I'd like to avoid displaying an empty user control when the application starts up. That is, this doesn't look great; whilst I'm waiting for the first item to come in and, finally, There's a problem with images. I'm loading an image over the web and I need to know when it's loaded otherwise the image goes on the screen before it's really loaded and then updates whilst the user is looking at it and that doesn't seem right at all to me :-) So, 4 things to fix even if the last one is called (1) just like the first one - I can't work list numbering in Live Writer :-) Dealing with the first issue isn't too difficult - my AtomFeedManager class fires a FeedItemUnavailable event so I could just add code to the handler for that which manufactures...

Following up on this post it's time to make the thing look a little bit better than it does right now. Some of this will be purely cosmetic, some of it will end up requiring some code changes. In the first instance, I'll go for some "cheap wins". I'll open up Expression Blend with my project and, first off, I'll go and grab a Windows-themed wallpaper from www.hdwallpapers.net (in the Computer section) such as this one; then I go to my project in Blend and add an existing item; and add that Image into the project. Having done that, what I usually do is right mouse on it to insert it into the scene; with the image in the scene, I make sure it's selected and then I used Tools->Make Brush Resource to create myself a new ImageBrush; With that created, I go and delete the image from the scene (not from the project!) and then I can go to the Window and set its background to be the Image Brush I just created as in; and so now I've got a nice(r) background. From there, it'd be nice to style my ItemDisplayControl UserControl...

Following on from the previous post , to get this work started I wanted to build a little library that supported what I wanted to do with the Twitter API. There's probably already a .NET library out there but I didn't search for it and my needs were fairly small and specific. The first thing that I wanted to do was to build a custom configuration file section to represent my configuration. In my configuration I wanted to be able to set; The language to use for searching twitter The set of search terms to search for. I wanted each search term to have the configuration options of; On/Off - i.e. isIncluded when we do searching Filter - i.e. I wanted to be able to filter to only include "positive" tweets, "negative" tweets, tweets that are explicitly either "positive" or "negative" and then "all" tweets. I don't know what you do when you want a custom configuration file section but I know what I do. I use the Configuration File Section Designer which I wrote about here . If you don't use this designer then I guess...

My previous post around the location and sensor platform in Windows 7 came a little bit out of context so apologies for that although I have since watched the PDC session and it's well worth watching. However...if you want to start at the beginning with Windows 7 then there's the Developer Guide which you can download from here; Developer Guide and you should also make sure that you're subscribed to Yochay's blog which is up here; The Windows 7 Blog for Developers

Back in 2005/2006 I spent quite a lot of time going around introducing WPF at various conferences and user groups and companies and I haven't really done so much of that "introduction" type work since. I've done a bunch of stuff with WPF and a bunch of talks about its enhancements in V3.5 and V3.5 Sp1 but I've not had to go back and do an "intro" for a while. I did one today for a company and so I had to put some things together and I thought I'd share them here in case they're of any use to you - some of these are deliberately very simple and I don't think the coverage is complete but it might be a starting point for something that you're doing. Firstly, here's my slides. There are some things missing but, hopefully, most of them are detailed on the slide that says "other topics" or something like that. Slides in PPTX Format (zipped) Slides in PPT Format Secondly, here's my demos. In order to use them you need to have a few files in place; c:\temp\video.wmv c:\temp\picture.jpg c:\temp\track.mp3 you can use whatever...