February 2009 - Mike Taulty's Blog

If you came along to our Rich Client event at The Lowry on Salford Quays; today then thanks a lot and I hope you found it useful. Here’s some snapshots I grabbed from the back of the event with MikeO talking about control templating;     and if you want all the slides and demos and so on then you head to; My post here Mike’s post here to get them.

Thanks to all the people who came to along to our Rich Client event in the Microsoft Edinburgh office today. If you’re looking for resources then you probably want to check out; this post here which will point you to other posts that have the demos and slides and so on. Apologies to people about the slightly dodgy state of my hardware today. My laptop seems to be genuinely dying – I’ve never really had any trouble with this machine until I arrived in Edinburgh today. It ran a little like this; Worked a little on the machine this morning. It was fine. Undocked it from its docking station (in the politest possible way) Took it to Edinburgh Resumed it. Had it blue-screen. Rebooted. Blue-screen. Rebooted to safe mode. Blue-screen. Found a helpful chap in the Microsoft office who leant me a Vista DVD. Rebooted off the DVD. Asked it to fix my startup problem. Rebooted. Blue-screen. Asked the Vista DVD to help me again. Rebooted. Worked ( possibly after Mike fiddled with some of my BIOS settings :-) ). Set up all my...

Dave has just started a blog over here which you should subscribe to if you’ve an interest in topics like UI, WPF, Silverlight or Surface. Actually, you should just subscribe anyway as it’s really cool stuff regardless of your interests :-) Dave works in our technology centre in the UK and has been involved in building some very smart apps with WPF. I’m hoping to capture some of this (with a bit more of a breakdown as to how some of this stuff actually works) for videos that we’ll try and post to Channel9 but in the meantime there’s a video up in Dave’s blog post which gives you a hint of the sort of things he’s been up to – it really is very, very cool :-)

I’m really liking this Blu Twitter Client; I’ve honestly no idea whether it’s a good or bad Twitter client as I only recently joined Twitter and I’ve never really tried any other clients so I’ve nothing to compare with. But that’s not the reason why I like Blu. The reason why I like Blu is that it’s a ClickOnce Application!! I’ve been out talking to people about ClickOnce since around 2005 but I think it’s fair to say that there’s not a huge number of ClickOnce applications on the public web like Blu is and I’m finding that running the app each day is quite exciting in that new features have appeared without me having to actively go out and hunt down whether there’s a new version of the app.

I have this little command line app that I’ve been using to navigate my developer Mesh with the Live Framework SDK. It started out as very basic but then today I realised that I should really extend it so that you can use it something like; cd cloud list objects cd meshObject1 list objects and so on. I was about to set about doing this when I realised that this is essentially already part of Powershell and a much smarter move would be for me to write a plug-in provider for Powershell that exposed the local/cloud Live Operating Environment as something that can be navigated from the shell. Now…I didn’t actually set about it yet ( mostly because I realised that I’d have to download the entire Windows SDK to get going – can that be right? :-) ) If anyone goes ahead and builds it then let me know and I’ll link to it here, otherwise I’ll try and build it myself when “spare time” comes around.

I did an event down in London with MikeO today called something along the lines of “Catching up with Rich Clients”. This is us in the “packed and warm” Microsoft, London office; The essential idea of it was to provide an overview of what’s been going on with WPF and Silverlight over the last couple of years for people who perhaps haven’t been following it too closely. It was good fun and it was a packed out event ( nice to see because we’re not doing many in-person events under the MSDN banner these days ) although we did run slightly awry with the timing and ate up another 10 mins of time over and above our allotted 3 hours. In terms of the slides, they’re published up here for download or viewing; http://www.slideshare.net/ukdpe and they’ll show up on the MSDN Events site in a few days In terms of the demos, I did a bunch of stuff and I’m not sure how useful it is in isolation but I thought I’d try and share it nonetheless. In the first section, I did some basic demos around; XAML Data Binding   ...

WPF needs some built-in (or toolkit) controls for selecting fonts and colours. There’s a font dialog article here and a sample here but (for me) I’m not sure that I always want a dialog, I might just want a group of combo boxes or a drop down or similar and, also, I’d like to just see those kinds of things “in the box” as an aid to productivity.

More than once, I’ve found myself wanting to be able to demonstrate the range of controls that are available for Silverlight and WPF and, today, I ended up in that same place and decided to do something about it. I built a very, very simple WPF application. Screenshot is below and you can install the application via ClickOnce by clicking on the picture below (note you'll need .NET Framework V3.5 Sp1 as I don't install it for you here) ; All it’s doing is displaying in a TreeView with a number of sections in it; WPF Built In Controls WPF Toolkit Controls WPF 3rd Party Controls Silverlight Built In Controls … and this is just driven by an XML configuration file that’s embedded into the application so if you happen to know of other sets of controls that should be included then let me know. What’s really cool about this stuff these days is that control vendors tend to have either a; WPF XBAP Silverlight XAP on their website showcasing their controls. So, in most cases all the application above is doing is using the...