Rob Relyea: WPF

Starting another blog - WindowsClient.net

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:18:32 GMT

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)

Have your own blog on blogs.windowsclient.net

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 12:42:27 GMT

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.

Brian Noyes - Databinding in WPF on .Net Rocks TV

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 12:09:07 GMT

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

Matthias Shapiro - Wii Remote and WPF databinding

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:42:55 GMT

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

Scott Hanselman - building an XBAP

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:06:43 GMT

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?

WPF Bloggers from VS team

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 17:24:54 GMT

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...

WPF Application Quality Guide v0.1 - whitepaper now available

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:02:41 GMT

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.

Syndicated Client Experience Starter Kit - for building a great reading experience and more...

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:49:07 GMT

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).

Adding Keyboard Shortcut to Controls in WPF: "_" instead of "&"

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 14:30:53 GMT

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???

sobees.com - video of upcoming app, accepting beta requests

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:28:28 GMT

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?

WPF 3.0sp1/3.5 & VS2008: what is it, where to get it, how to give feedback

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:22:38 GMT

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 in Redmond

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:24:43 GMT

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!

VS 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 available this month

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:19:32 GMT

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...

Josh Smith: catching up to his blog

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 13:26:17 GMT

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...

WPF Bootcamp is online

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 12:56:10 GMT

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, Surface team blog, WPF development on Surface

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 12:39:51 GMT

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: getting a font that shows pixels

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:53:59 GMT

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?

Petzold's WPF Samples in VB

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:48:29 GMT

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:

Great news!

New .Net 3.5 Namespace Poster

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:00:40 GMT

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.

Daniel Cazzulino: codegen of dataobjects

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:08:26 GMT

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...

Josh Smith: CodeProject on building a reusable selection indicator for a ListBox

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:30:38 GMT

Josh delivers another great writeup for those familiar with the basics of WPF already: http://www.codeproject.com/WPF/TheWpfThoughtProcess.asp

Discussing many options on the way, he shows one way to build:

WPF Perf Team: improving WPF app startup time

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:02:19 GMT

Jossef, follows his earlier summary of 3.0sp1/3.5 perf work (which I pointed out here), with a "Improving WPF applications startup time" article.

WPF Perf Team: List of Perf improvements in 3.0sp1/3.5

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 17:26:39 GMT

Jossef, the PM of the WPF Perf Team, spells out many of the perf improvements coming soon to a .Net Framework near you: Performance improvements in WPF in .Net 3.5 / 3.0 SP1 We continue to keep performance work a major focus across the CLR and WPF team -- driven by the scenarios you are building.

Other related perf guidance from MSDN "Optimizing WPF Application Performance": redirects to MSDN article via http://robrelyea.com/wpf/perf

KC Chesnut: Augmented reality - video, barcode detection, 3d shape placement

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 12:13:18 GMT

Just saw this on Michael Brown's post "Hey you've got your WPF in my augmented reality". Similar in concept to Microsoft Surface (how it uses video to detect objects), but KC shows how you could overlay 3d shapes in the middle of a video...very cool! KC's post: "/wpfAugReal (augmented reality)"

Creating a Button with the UAC Shield icon using WPF & other StockIcons

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:18:26 GMT

An internal question just came up about the best way for a WPF application to show the UAC shield in a button or link.

For example Control Panel\System and Maintenance\System shows a link like this:

Anyway, I was happy to find a 1 year old post by Yves Dolce: "StockIcons for WPF" that shows how to do this. He thanks me (along with several others) in the post...but I don't know what I did to help :-)

Greg Schechter: STA, MultiThreading, WPF, .Net Parallel Processing Framework, Multicore

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:48:12 GMT

An architect on the WPF/Silverlight team, Greg Schechter, replies to a WPF Forum question about multi-threading and WPF. His reply goes fairly deep...and he hints to a follow up blog post...so go ask any follow ups on the forum.

Update: Greg has followed up with a blog post "Making use of multiprocessing in WPF" which goes a bit farther...

Microsoft XML Team builds Xml Schema Designer for VS in WPF

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:38:39 GMT

I was very excited when Stan Kitsis of the MS XML Team pointed me towards the community technology preview (CTP) of the XML Schema Designer that shipped last month.

See their announcement: Announcing CTP1 of the XML Schema Designer (also check out the video of the functionality or download the bits...)

I haven't used it yet, I just watched the video a minute ago,...but it looks like a nice component to help XML/XSD heads!

Over time, you'll see more and more groups from within MS and elsewhere in the industry shipping WPF projects that they have been baking...very nice!

Update: to be clear, the treeview/pane on the right are the parts written in WPF. The VS Shell on the outside and the Xml Editor on the left, are existing code written in Win32/WinForms.

WPF & CSLA.NET & VSLive NY

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 23:14:52 GMT

Great to see WPF showing up on other people's forum like the CSLA forums @ http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/HidingADisabledSaveButtonInWPF.aspx ...not just the ms forums. Thanks Josh for spreading the WPF love as well.

More medical visualization/interaction from Interknowlogy

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:05:24 GMT

Looking forward to seeing this: http://www.codeattest.com/blogs/martin/2007/09/tim-will-show-heart-surger-application.html. Looks like this may take some of the expertise from doing the Scripps Institute Cancer Research app forward. Exciting!

Targeting Media Center with WPF and/or Silverlight

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:31:37 GMT

Casey Chestnut, who I believe is a Media Center MVP, has been a proponent of XBAPs targetting Media Center. Now he is also excited about getting Silverlight 1.1 working there.

47hats.com: a MicroISV's "real world WPF biz app #1"

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 22:21:26 GMT

Worth a read: Hard lessons from the field - ‘Real-world WPF business application #1’

XTab: Exploring the flexibilty of WPF's ListBox

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 22:14:15 GMT

XTab (on vbcity.com) explores some of the flexibility of WPF's ListBox...he hasn't even gotten to ItemsSource and ItemPanelTemplate.

WPF vs Windows Forms

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 23:37:50 GMT

Josh Smith started a discussion with: WPF vs Windows Forms. Matt Davey replied with WPF vs Windows Forms. Doug Finke also chimed in with: Why use WPF?

If you look at System.Windows.Forms.dll in .Net 3.5, I don't think there are many changes from 2.0 (I'm not positive about this though)...so while there will be enhancements to the .Net framework and VS that benefit WinForms developers, eventually our goal is to make WPF, the tools around it and the community around those a more than sufficient replacement for Windows Forms. How soon we get there for you will depend on your task at hand...

For now, you should rest certain that Windows Forms or WPF can both be good choices and depend on the application you are targeting.

WPF: Determining if an inherited property is set on an object or is inherited.

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 19:57:51 GMT

Internal email that may be helpful, read from the bottom to the top...

From: Helpful Person

It sounds like you want to use DependencyPropertyHelper.GetValueSource().
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.dependencypropertyhelper.getvaluesource.aspx

Pass it your DependencyObject and the DependencyProperty you want to inspect, and it will return you a ValueSource.

Next look at the BaseValueSource property of the result. If the property was set directly the value will be “Local”, if it was inherited from a parent it will say “Inherited”.

From: WPF App Coder
Subject: Identifying the source of a property?

I need to determine whether a particular property was set for an object or whether the object inherits it from its parent. E.g. DataContext property, once set for a Panel, will be the same on all children contained by the panel. I would like to know that it was defined for the Panel. Is there a way to do it?

InkCanvas and multi-stroke gestures

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 19:47:30 GMT

More internal email, read bottom to top...spilling the secrets of Microsoft faster that mini-msft...:-)

From: Helpful Answerer

InkCanvas only supports single-stroke gestures. If you want to support multi-stroke gestures, you’ll have to queue up the 2 most recent strokes (with an appropriate timer) and send them to the GestureRecognizer yourself.

Why isn’t this documented better? Why doesn’t InkCanvas.SetEnabledGestures() throw when passed a multi-stroke gesture? Hmm…. both good questions.

From: Inquisitive Inquirer
Subject: InkCanvas and multi-stroke gestures

I'm trying to implement an InkCanvas recognizing gestures with more than one stroke (double tap, arrows, etc), but I'm only receiving recognized gestures with single strokes.

Is there something I've to take into account or a different setting?

Controls for WPF on Codeplex as WpfContrib

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 01:17:06 GMT

Got a message via my blog from aelij about WpfContrib, whose goal is to create a stable, reusable library of classes for use with your WPF project. http://www.codeplex.com/wpfcontrib/

He discusses the project in his post: The WPF Contrib Project

VSTO and WPF: Using WPF with Office

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 18:56:06 GMT

My depth of knowledge isn't deep when it comes to VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office), however this is a very important scenario for some customers.

Eric Carter posted a “How-To” on his blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_carter/archive/2006/11/07/using-wpf-controls-inside-a-vsto-actionspane-or-customtaskpane.aspx

A call for "community content" in MSDN on WPF topics

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 11:23:00 GMT

I've just added my 2nd entry in the WPF docs on MSDN (http://robrelyea.com/wpf/docs).

I linked to a post about using the Stretch property by Mike Hillberg in MSDN's documentation on System.Windows.Media.Stretch
In the past I had linked to Pavan Podila's list of recommended practices for custom control developers from MSDN's Control Authoring Overview

I'll continue to try to do this more often. Can you please do the same? Scroll down to the bottom of any documentation, see the community content section at the very bottom. Make it better!

Kirupa: RenderTransform vs LayoutTransform in WPF/Blend

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 10:36:47 GMT

In "Transforms in WrapPanel and StackPanel in WPF/Blend", Kirupa steps through WrapPanel, StackPanel and discusses the fact that using the adorners to rotate in Blend always uses a RenderTransform...he shows how to do a LayoutTransform via the property grid. Good knowledge to learn about WPF's Layout system and how to do this in Blend.

ComponentOne - "Schedule components" for WPF Beta

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:27:58 GMT

ComponentOne has a page with details on Chart, Grid and now Schedule for WPF.

Schedule for WPF Beta
The world's first scheduling suite of tools delivering Schedule, Month Calendar, and Multi-Month Calendar components for the WPF platform.
Beta Available - Register Now

WPF for biz apps, or not.

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:25:11 GMT

Flatlander writes that he finds WPF valuable for biz apps, despite our guidance that having less controls, more immature tools, etc...

I'd love to see more examples of biz like apps that people have built with WPF...

[Update: I've gotten some private messages pointing towards some business uses of WPF that are interesting, but not public yet.]

Eric Sink: WPF isn't always pretty. Woodworking XBAP.

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:48:08 GMT

WPF isn't always pretty...yes I think there are a bunch of things that WPF and tools can help make it easier for design challenged folks (like me) to build good looking things. Love to hear your feedback in this area.

Eric posts a woodworking model viewer XBAP. Description. XBAP link.

Update 8/30/2007: just ran the app again, and explored a bit more. Very cool way to do assembly instructions. Select the different steps on the left. Some even show assembly via animations.

A few similar 3d visualizer apps are:

TSRI C-ME Application Download a demo version. You will need Windows Vista or WPF on Windows XP to run the application.
3D Collaborator Leveraging the technology in the C-ME application, InterKnowlogy built the 3D Collaborator for AutoCAD Drawings. Download a demo version.
Edgenet Vision

Sells/Griffiths: "Programming WPF" book now shipping!

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 17:49:13 GMT

Happy to hear via Chris Sells blog that Programming WPF (a collaboration between Chris and Ian Griffiths) has hit the streets. Looking forward to reviews from the dev community. http://robrelyea.com/wpf/books has links to wpf books.

Delphi & WPF: sample app...

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:48:17 GMT

Details on how Delphi developers can use .Net 3.0 (WPF, etc...):

Highlander: Convert HTML to Xaml Demo (.NET 3.0 / WPF)

New WPF App: Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:33:22 GMT

I just added to the Channel 9 WPF Application Portfolio page (which I remember via http://robrelyea.com/wpf/apps) another Microsoft shipping product that is using WPF. I think they did so in v1.0 and now have just shipped v1.5 of Microsoft Robotics Studio. The Visual Programming Language (vpl.exe) part of the Studio was written in WPF.

Here is a screenshot (click for a closer look) I took from VPL using VPLTutorial4 (which I downloaded with the Sumo Competition for Microsoft Robotics Studio (1.5)).

Hopefully they used some Xaml as some data formats...but I'm not sure...

Animating WPF Images - how to trade quality for speed

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:45:02 GMT

Robby Ingebretsen, of Identity Mine, posts a quick intro to RenderOptions.SetBitmapScalingMode.

MSDN covers it here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.renderoptions.setbitmapscalingmode.aspx

Looks like you can use it as an attached property (RenderOptions.BitmapScalingMode="HighQuality")...or as Robby does, programmatically right before and after animating the image.

Creating a thumbnail image in WPF (using worker thread and decoding for the target size)

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 17:08:18 GMT

This question just came up again. A teammate pointed to Aaron's post: http://www.wiredprairie.us/journal/2007/03/brrrr_its_cold_out_here_freezi.html

WPF book opinions from MVP Frank La Vigne

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:23:30 GMT

http://robrelyea.com/wpf/books has links to most of the WPF books. Frank La Vigne does a quick write up giving his opinion of many of them. Good read.

Mike (I believe) Davey also posts a write up on Petzold's new "3D Programming for Windows"

Conference Touch - WPF Kiosk/Touch App for Conference

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:43:22 GMT

Big Screen Blog (Niall Ginsbourg) talks about the WPF Touch/Surface/Kiosk App for TechEd New Zealand. I would think that most Kiosk apps would find value in WPF...anybody know of others in production yet?

Kevin and Tim on C9 demoing WPF 3.5

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 13:38:17 GMT

If you are curious about 3.5, I strongly recommend taking a look at the video recently posted on Channel 9 about WPF 3.5. Tim Sneath discusses the video here and Kevin Moore here. I watched the video at double speed...perhaps that wasn't totally wise, since Kevin already speaks at double speed most of the time. :-)