I'm not positive what I'm going to do with this blog, but I'm heavily considering moving most of my blogging over to WindowsClient.net.  Just did my first post: Rob start his WindowsClient.net Era - 3rd blogs a charm (http://blogs.windowsclient.net/rob_relyea/archive/2008/02/10/3rd-time-is-a-charm.aspx)

WindowsClient.net, is of course, the Windows client technology community website...like asp.net is for ASP.Net developers.  Now you can have your own blog there:

Interested in blogging with the WindowsClient.NET community? Well now you can, with your own blog on the site. Read the terms of use and if you agree, click here to sign-up.

First Adam Nathan on Silverlight, WPF, Popfly...now Brian Noyes digging into Databinding...love it.

Interesting observations by Matthias: http://www.designerwpf.com/2008/02/01/using-wpf-binding-for-a-huge-performance-boost/

Scott builds a simple XBAP...some commenters are questioning why XBAP vs standalone apps, etc...anybody with opinions care to comment one way or another?

Noah Coad and Paul Harrington from the VS platform team have recently been blogging a bit about WPF.  Paul has been working on a maze generator with WPF and databinding...

The “WPF Application Quality Guide v 0.1” white paper is live online at the WindowsClient.NET site today!  It’s a guide that we hope upon completion can be a one-stop shop for guidance and best practices to improve product quality and testability for WPF applications and controls teams and vendors.  

This first CTP has the proposed TOC and some select content, based on the feedback we hear we will add and release more targeted content in future CTPs.

Here are a few pointers to the Guide v 0.1:

• From the “Featured News” section at the default page: http://windowsclient.net/ (temporary)
• Content in HTML format  (permanent)
• Content in word doc for download  (permanent)
• From “Learn” tab / Latest Content  (temporary):  WPF Application Quality Guide
• From “Learn” tab / Windows Client Technical Articles: http://windowsclient.net/learn/techarticles.aspx (permanent)

Please check it out, let others know this guide, blog about it and link to it!  Help us making this guide better - We are looking forward to hearing your feedback via email or online comment at the bottom of the html page.

WindowsClient.Net just announced the newly available Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit.

Introducing the new Syndicated Client Experiences (SCE) Starter Kit! Realize the power of Windows Presentation Foundation to create immersive, engaging multimedia content experiences with rich syndicated content, from documents and photos to videos and podcasts. You may have seen such experiences from New York Times, Seattle PI, and others - now you can easily create such experiences yourself with the SCE Starter Kit!

The SCE Starter Kit page includes pointers to the familiar New York Times Reader and a new MSDN Reader (for you developers out there...)

Times Reader by The New York Times

One of the top 25 products in PC World’s list of 100 Best Products of 2007, the Times Reader is  a unique reading experience that combines the easy-to-read format of print with the utility of digital.

MSDN Reader

The MSDN Reader allows you to browse through MSDN Magazine articles like never before. Read through articles, view figures and code snippets in an intuitive and easy-to-use experience. The complete source code for the reader is also provided for you here (coming soon).

This is one of the things that is different in WPF due to Xaml/XML considerations...perhaps VS2008 & Expression Blend could ease the transition by detecting the entry of "&" into the Content property?

Internal email...please read from bottom.

---

From: MS Employee #2
Using '&' in XAML would require typing & due to XML syntax.

From: MS Employee #1
Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2007 1:52 AM
Subject: _ vs. &

I spent about a day figuring out a way to add keyboard shortcut to my WPF button – in winforms/vb for all these years it was a simple & before the char u want to use as a shortcut key – wonder why was the & changed to a _ in wpf???

I was happy to hear from Vince that they have posted a video (only in French today, but English coming soon) of the .Net/WPF app they've been working on and are accepting beta requests.  http://sobees.com

• Pierre Chappaz blogs about sobees
• What is sobees?

What it is?/Where to get it?

When you think November, does your mouth water for Turkey. Microsoft is plotting to make you think of great software, not Turkey, when you think of November - .Net/VS - a great platform and great tools to help you build great software:

• .Net 3.0/VS2005 Extensions for .Net 3.0 in November 2006.
• .Net 3.5/VS2008  in November 2007.

After spending 6 years on WPF's first release, it was great to be able to change pace and ship a release in 1 year! WindowsClient.Net has an updated list of the essential downloads for WPF development (.Net3.5, VS Express Editions, Expression Blend) and has a list of WPF/VS/.Net improvements in the 3.5/2008 wave.  I'd also recommend you look at MSDN's list of things to install (includes links to 90 day trial versions of VS2008) and What's New in Windows Presentation Foundation Version 3.5. This release has lots of great things for WPF developers (and future WPF developers)!  Check out some of the new 3.5 focused videos @ http://windowsclient.net/learn/videos_orcas.aspx.

Build great apps!  Give feedback.

We hope you are happy with this wave!  We look forward to seeing more of your great work on top of WPF and hearing your feedback...see you on the forums!

• Feedback on WPF features in .Net 3.5 should go on the WPF forum.
• Feedback on WPF features in VS should go on the WPF Designer ("Cider") forum.

Remember - Much of the work we did for 3.5, will also ship in .Net 3.0sp1 (which will ship in Windows Vista SP1).

More Info

A few other interesting info snippets from some Developer Division announcement posts:

• From Scott Guthrie's announcement: Note that VS 2008 runs side-by-side with VS 2005 - so it is totally fine to have both on the same machine (you will not have any problems with them on the same box).
• From S. ("Soma") Somasegar's announcement: The entire family of Visual Studio products (from the Express Editions to the Professional version to Visual Studio Team Suite) and .NET Framework 3.5 are available for immediate download here.

Laurent Bugnion was in town a few weeks ago, I was happy to meet him; see what he is up to and listen to a bunch of great feedback - a goldmine of feedback.

Silverlight/WPF difference
Since then, he has found a rendering difference for RadialGradientBrush OpacityMask between Silverlight 1.0 and WPF.

A previous post from me on a similar issue:

Xaml rendering differences in Silverlight 1.0 and WPF - not a good thing - tell us about it...

I discovered a blog post earlier this week from mark-dot-net that talked about rendering differences between Silverlight and WPF with the same markup.  I was very glad to find this.  If anybody knows of any similar issues, please show us the Xaml!

Nice bit of news that Guy Smith-Ferrier got from Soma's keynote in Barcelona for TechEd Europe 2007:

• Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 will be available for download by MSDN subscribers before the end of November 2007

To clarify, .Net framework 3.0sp1/3.5 will be downloadable by anybody...

Catching up with Josh's blog, here are some of the highlights I see...

• Visualize routed events...he points to Karl Shifflett's new Routed Event Viewer
• Making routed commands smarter...
• Karl Shifflett Rocks...Karl posts 2 other options for Josh's selection indicator for ListBoxItems.
• The Infragistics Tangerine Exemplar...
• F# stuff...WPF in F#; Logging Routed Commands in F#; Walking the visual tree in F#; Analyzing the visual tree in F#
• The Danger of Assigning Event Handlers in XAML...not sure if the comments clearly say whether people think we should change our behavior in this area..will noodle on...

Earlier this year we did a few day event for a number of partners (and potential partners) about WPF...anyway, I just ran across Ralf Rottmann's pointer to it and realized that I had never pointed it out to anybody.  Cleverly, Karsten/Tim/etc... had it recorded for your viewing pleasure as well...

Go check out the WPF bootcamp...2-3 days worth of sessions.

Just catching up on Tim's blog...found his pointer to this session: Attend the WPF Virtual Bootcamp - no need to register! (comments on Tim's post show that some people are having a hard time watching them online...Joshua Allen repiles: John; yeah it seems to get a bit out of sync.  The downloadable version should be fine; appears to be something in the way they were encoded interacting with the web-based player.)

Matt Davey (Lab49), who I recently had the pleasure "to meet" via LiveMeeting (great demos!), pointed to a blog from the surface team (blogs.msdn.com/surface).

• Robert Levy, a PM on the Surface team, shows a very cool hello world demo.  Check out his debugging experience...he has a surface next to his normal PC.  I want that!  Anyway, ScatterView seems cool.  The Scatterview post.  The ScatterView video.  (Watch it!)
• Robert gives advice on how to prepare yourself for Surface development in "Development Frameworks".  Seems like they have XNA and WPF development story...

internal mail thread...read from bottom to top...

From: AnswererB

http://www.dafont.com/font.php?file=green_screen

From: Questioner

Already tried it. Its fixed with but still true type.

OCR A is the best, but its still true type.....

From: AnswererA
Try “Lucida Console”, you draw your own bitmap font text.

From: Questioner
I have a screen that I need to look like the old dos characters, pixels and all. But I only appear to be able to put in TrueType fonts.

Is there any way to show a system font etc?

Over on the VBTeam blog, you'll notice that Patrick Dengler, Young Joo and Evan Lim are working to convert Petzold's WPF Samples into Visual Basic:

• Why you should learn WPF (and how I can help)
• Continued search for Small Business Developers and Chapter 2 of Petzold's book (finally!)
• Petzold Chapter 3 (Young Joo)

Great news!

I'm excited that .Net 3.5 is getting very close to release.  One sign of that is that we just posted a "Commonly Used Types and Namespaces" poster.  Paul Andrew, a Product Manager for WCF & WF, just posted it.

Didn't dig in, but I like the sound of the work that Daniel blogs about in "Automatic generation of data-binding interfaces for data context objects".  I have built a prototype or two in this area.  We should work to make it easier to build your data layer...