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  • Free Client Day at Microsoft TechDays UK – London, 15th April

    I wanted to do a call out for the Client development day that we’re running as part of the UK TechDays event. This is a FREE event that’s running all day in London on the 15th April and it’s targeted at developers who are interested in hearing about client development with .NET Framework V4.0 and for Windows 7. The agenda on the website doesn’t quite do it justice in that we’ve managed to get some really fantastic speakers for this day; Specifically, there’s 2 full sessions of walking through features of .NET Framework V4.0 that apply to client development with Ingo Rammer of ThinkTecture; Ingo’s one of the very best tech speakers around and we’re thrilled to have him at this event. If you want to get a deeper dive into what’s present in .NET 4.0 that a Client developer can take advantage of, then this is the place to be. We’re equally lucky to have a session on Windows Presentation Foundation 4.0 delivered by Ian Griffiths who’s a WPF/Silverlight guru, MVP, consultant, developer, top speaker and also teaches...

  • Highlights of 2009

    I copied this idea from Eric (and Mike ) and thought I’d try and drill out my own set of “top 5” blog posts for 2009 as it draws to a close. Here’s the top 5 most viewed blog posts that I wrote this year; Silverlight & WPF Control Browser A quick look at Silverlight 3- Data Validation A quick look at Silverlight 3- DataForm Control Silverlight 3 and GPU Acceleration C# and Optional Parameters it’s a bit of a mixed-bag in terms of content but from looking at the next 5 down; Expression Blend 3- More on Actions, Triggers, Behaviors Silverlight 3 and Navigation Applications WPF, ComboBox, FontFamilies Silverlight 3 – What Are RIA Services- A quick look at Silverlight 3- Save File Dialog I guess I can draw them together under the banner of “Silverlight and WPF” :-) In terms of content not written in 2009 but viewed in 2009 the top 5 are ( filtering out any of the previous content ); Windows Communication Foundation- Videos LINQ to Video #18 A word for WinDbg Silverlight 2 - Simple Editing of Web Service Data in...
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  • Windows 7 & WPF 4.0 Beta – Taskbar programming of jumplists and thumbnail previews

    The other day I had a talk to give which included a little around Windows 7 shell programming in .NET 4.0 Beta 2 and I hadn’t really looked at it so I took a few mins out to take a look at how you can program the Taskbar in Windows 7 from WPF in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. I was really looking for a short, snappy screencast to take me through it and I didn’t find one ( which doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t exist but I did search around a little ) so I made a couple that I’ve embedded here. One is around jumplists; Windows 7 - Programming Taskbar jumplists with Visual Studio 2010 . and the other is around getting thumbnail previews of application windows on the Taskbar; Windows 7 - Programming Taskbar previews with Visual Studio 2010 . You’ll need Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 to follow along with these; Download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Also, I mention that there is more complete Windows 7 functionality in the Windows API Code-Pack so take a look at that too; Download Windows API Code-Pack and, as always...
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  • Hacking Kaxaml to work on .NET 4.0

    This is what’s known as a “on the train” project :-) I wanted to get a version of Kaxaml that understood WPF 4.0 Beta 2 and so I spotted that the source was on CodePlex and thought I’d set about downloading it and seeing if I could get something going. I should probably try and contribute to the project rather than just writing this blog-post but as far as I can tell the source on CodePlex isn’t the most recent version of Kaxaml as it doesn’t seem to have the Silverlight 2 support that the most recent version from the website looks to have. So, rather than contribute to the wrong code-base I took some simple steps that you might be able to replicate to get a Kaxaml for WPF 4 up and running. Took me about 10 mins on the train. Download and unzip the Kaxaml source using the link above. Download and unzip the source for SharpDevelop from this site . In the SharpDevelop code, navigate to the src\Libraries\ICSharpCode.TextEditor folder and open up the solution with VS 2010. Use the properties page on the ICSharpCode...
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  • Pete Brown on Silverlight and WPF Convergence

    Great post from Pete over here about Silverlight/WPF convergence; “The Future of Client App Dev: WPF and Silverlight Convergence” It’s funny as someone asked me just yesterday what my view was about Silverlight/WPF post-PDC and in the light of Silverlight 4 and I expressed pretty much the same view as Pete does here although less eloquently and in a lot fewer words in that I said something like; “I don’t think the position of the two technologies has changed too much” Hey, I’m a man of few words :-) Sure, Silverlight 4 has a bunch more functionality but fundamentally it still all hangs around the magic three words of; “Rich”, “Web” and “.NET” with attributes like; Quick, easy platform deployment Quick, easy app deployment Designed for cross platform Sandboxed by default with limited ( but significant ) options for breaking beyond that sandbox Network stack that’s optimised with functionality for the web rather than the LAN etc. etc. etc. etc. whereas WPF for me all hangs around the words of; “Rich”, “Windows”...

  • WPF 4 Beta 2 Feature Walkthroughs ( Text and LayoutRounding )

    I’ve been really enjoying Lester’s feature walkthrough posts over here about various features of WPF V4 Beta 2; Concluding “New WPF Features” Series There’s some really good stuff in there. It made me author a couple of XAML files. Text display is arguably more important than ever as more and more reading moves to screens and in the past WPF has taken some flak over not always putting enough options into the hands of developers around tuning options around text such as where/when ClearType is used. You can read more about the details over here on the WPF Text Blog . This caused me to put together a little XAML file of my own to try and play with these options as below; <Page xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:ctl="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Media;assembly=PresentationCore" xmlns:sys="clr-namespace:System;assembly=mscorlib" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <Page.Resources> <ObjectDataProvider x:Key...
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  • Cartogoo’s 3D Surveyor

    I got pinged an interesting link from Linda over at Black Marble about a company that they’ve worked with called Cartogoo who have built a multi-touch surveying & mapping application – interesting app and you can see a quick demo over here ( assuming my embed of a YouTube video works ) For me, multi-touch makes perfect sense for these kinds of applications where you’re doing a job and don’t want to be burdened with mouse and keyboard. I’m not sure at the time of writing whether this is a WPF application or a native application – I will see if I can find out.
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  • ScottGu on WPF 4

    Scott put out a great post overnight on new features in WPF V4 – well worth a read. Scott’s Post I think I’d better come up with something original for this blog with my next post as the last 3-4 have just been me pointing to work done by Scott :-)
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  • Linked In Talk - “Beyond Silverlight with WPF”

    If you came along to the talk that I did for the Linked In .NET User Group today via Live Meeting then thanks very much for doing that and I promised you a number of links which I’m listing here. I showed bunch of different items; “WPF Airlines” Logical Pixels Tiled image brushes Tiled geometry brushes Tiled visual brushes Path based animations 3D Cube with ambient light and spotlights 2D on 3D integration Documents HTML Frame Control Ink and Gestures Code - Ink and Gesture Code - Speech Unified document using various pieces Binding – static binding Binding – ObjectDataProvider to databind enum values Binding – ObjectDataProvider to databind a process list Binding – XmlDataProvider to databind a twitter RSS feed Binding – Multibinding to DateTime.Now Triggers – simple trigger on a rectangle Triggers – simple trigger to control volume on a video Code – Commands in my notepad like example Code – Printing using the “WPF Airlines” application Code - HTML Interop with WebBrowser Code – Windows Forms Interop and all...
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  • PDC 2009: Workshop - “Getting the Most out of Silverlight 3” with “the Griffs”

      It looks like I’ve struck Gold and managed to get myself lined up to help out at PDC09 on the pre-conference workshop; Getting the Most out of Silverlight 3 “Come learn how the robust features of Silverlight 3 help developers to create innovative, compelling cross-platform Internet applications without being limited by HTML and Javascript. In addition, hear some of the best practices and patterns for building Silverlight applications, and find out how to use Microsoft Expression Blend to get the best productivity between designers and developers using them.” this is being run by “The Griffs” – namely Ian Griffiths and Rich Griffin who are both top-notch UK Silverlight/WPF/Expression guys. There’s also a Channel 9 page here for the session. I’ll be there at the workshop all day helping the guys out by; Applying talc to any sweaty keyboards Making sure the guys are appropriately made up for the camera Fighting back Silverlight/WPF groupies besotted with our heroes but, more seriously, I know it’s going to...

  • Silverlight 3 UK Launch – Interview with Ian Ellison-Taylor

    At the recent Silverlight 3 UK launch I got a chance to catch up with Ian Ellison-Taylor who’s Microsoft’s General Manager for Presentation Platform and Tools. As usual at Microsoft, I had to ask for a translation around what that job title means and, in simple words, Ian owns; WPF and Silverlight which makes him a very interesting chap to chat to :-) Ian kindly keynoted the launch event for us and even agreed to answering semi-random questions from me around WPF and Silverlight so I captured the chat that we had on video and dropped it out to Channel 9 here; Silverlight 3 UK Launch- Chat with Ian Ellison-Taylor Whilst Ian has the scary word “manager” in his job title ;-) it’s very, very obvious from chatting to him that he “knows his stuff” inside and out and can talk at any level about what we’re doing around presentation technologies – seriously impressive stuff.

  • Applications Using WPF

    A common question around technologies like WPF is; “Who’s using this?” and I picked up a really slick brochure the other day with some great references around customers using WPF across lots of different kinds of applications and so I thought I’d share here – bear in mind that this is just a handful of selected applications and ( as you might expect ) there’s a lot more WPF applications out there than we might be able to fit into a brochure :-) I snipped out all the images and dropped them into a DeepZoom project. The latest Deep Zoom Composer has a new SlideShow feature which makes this pretty easy to do so I just used that and then applied a slight hack to what was emitted from the tool to produce the player below for free;   Enjoy browsing the breadth of applications that people have built with WPF – the player is probably better if you set it to full screen as I’ve left it pretty small here but you can also view it here   Off-Topic – My Hack to DeepZoom Composer’s SlideShow Project…   If you...
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  • Windows 7: Experimenting with Multi-Touch on Windows 7 ( Part 5 )

    I got around to installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and so I thought it made sense to follow up this post by taking a quick look at what WPF V4.0 Beta 1 has to offer in the same area. As far as I know, Beta 1 does not have the low level WM_TOUCH style message processing that I looked at a little here and here but it does have support for gestures and inertia ( which is probably the support that most applications want/need ) similar to what I used from the wrapper library in the posts here and here . I defined another UI to play with which just presents a rectangle on a canvas; <Window x:Class="WpfApplication9.Window1" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300" WindowState="Maximized"> <Grid> <Canvas x:Name="canvas" Background="Blue" ManipulationMode="All" ManipulationDelta="OnManipulationDelta"...
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  • Speaking at MIX Essentials, Dublin, 24th June

    Just a quick plug – I’ll be doing some sessions on Silverlight 3 at MIX Essentials in Dublin on the 24th June. Click the picture above to jump to the site where you can register. It’s an all day event with 2 tracks running concurrently and I like the strap-line that says “ Completely Free” :-) Maybe see you there…
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  • Silverlight: Product Maintenance Application ( Part 6 – Porting to WPF )

    Following on from this post . As expected, porting my Utilities library to WPF wasn’t too difficult. It was a matter of creating a WPFUtilities class library, adding the existing source from Utilities as linked code files and then referencing PresentationCore and PresentationFramework and hitting build. then again, there were only a couple of very basic classes in there so it’s not too surprising. Next, I thought I’d try and port my Security project and so created another Class Library project WPFSecurity and added the existing source files as linked files again. This project though is a bit more complex in that it has 2 sets of WCF service references in order to call the Authentication and Role services made available by ASP.NET. I need to add service references to my WPFSecurity project and try and ensure as few code changes as possible by doing that. In adding the references, I made sure to use the same proxy namespace names; and also all references in Silverlight are asynchronous and so my...
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(C) Mike Taulty, 2010. All rights reserved. The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my opinion. Inappropriate comments will be deleted at the authors discretion. All code samples are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.
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