Posted in Uncategorized on February 23, 2007| 6 Comments »
I like to use Windows Explorer in maximize view most of the time. In Windows XP I would set the Maximize property in the shortcut. I tried setting the value in Vista but it made no difference.
A little snooping in the registry turns up the MaximizeApps key. I don’t know if this works on all apps or just Windows Explorer but I solved my problem.
Find this Key
-Walt
Posted in .NET 3.0, WPF on February 23, 2007| Leave a Comment »
I’ve been using Vista on my laptop for the last week. Most days I’m very happy with the Vista experience. It certainly improves the WPF programming experience with the Windows Driver Display Model (WDDM) video drivers. The graphics render as smooth as silk.
Vista installed in about 20 minutes. I’m getting a 3.6 Windows Experience rating on a two year old Dell 9300. Vista worked flawlessly on the first boot and is much faster than my previous XP install. I hear that many people are getting slower response with Vista over XP, but that hasn’t been my experience.
Not everything has been flawless however. I can’t use VMware Workstation 5.5. I tried the VMWare Workstation 6.0 beta but is was sooooo sloooowwww that its was useless. I’m back to using VPC 2007 for the time being.
Mostly I’m loving Vista. Having the ever-present search is a killer feature. When I work on my XP virtual computers I really miss it. What? I’ve got to go find the item in the Start menu. How lame.
I’ve found a few annoyances too. I’m going to post a short series of tips about fix to Vista that make me happy. Mostly for my own lookup later. But I found on my old blog , my tips continually got traffic years after the original post.
-Walt
Posted in Uncategorized on February 22, 2007| Leave a Comment »
I’ll be in Rochester NY next week. Bob Nims was gracious and invited me to speak at the Visual Developers of Upstate New York (VDUNY) group on Wednesday February 28th. I’m talking about WPF (of course). If you’re in the area stop by for the evening.
VDUNY Website
Note: My talk is not listed on their site but the meeting will be at the Microsoft office.
Notes from Bob
Our schedule for Wednesday night, February 28th is:
6:00 PM Food arrives
6:30 PM (or thereabout) Program begins
8:00 PM (or shortly thereafter) distribution of SWAG and continuing discussion.
Please RSVP if you will be attending and indicate if you will be having Pizza. We request a $4 contribution for the Pizza, soda, and cookies and the RSVPs help me determine how much stuff to order, so your help is appreciated.
VDUNY meets at the offices of Microsoft at 100 Corporate Woods in Brighton (across from MCC near the intersection of I390 and highway 15A (East Henrietta Road). This is a link to a Map To VDUNY Meeting. I hope that all that wish to will be able to attend.
My Abstract
WPF — Microsoft’s magnificent new graphics engine
By now you’ve probably heard of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). But how well do you really know WPF? It’s been my experience in talking to .NET developers that many have no idea of how powerful WPF is. Some think it is a watered down graphics engine that can animate buttons on a form. Others think it is a new API for Vista and has no impact on applications they are currently building.
But they are wrong.
WPF represents the first significant change to the Windows graphics engine in over ten years. What is trivial to build with WPF is difficult or impossible in Microsoft’s current Winforms technology. The WPF API is chock full of improvements for constructing rich client applications. WPF is hardware accelerated, using the graphics rendering engine in your GPU for faster processing of UI primitives. It is vector based, via Direct3D, which provides truly scalable and resolution independent UIs. WPF makes it easy to integrate video, audio, text, animation and 2D-3D graphics into a seamless montage
You may not need 3D in your business application but I bet you have UI ideas that are difficult to accomplish with the current set of graphics tools – like GDI. If you truly care about creating a great user interface, you owe it to yourself to see what WPF can do.
Here’s what one attendee to a recent NET 3.0 road-show said after the event.
“I attended this event to learn mostly about WCF and WF. I was expecting WPF to be a big waste of time. Not only did Walt do an excellent job explaining the benefits of Windows Presentation Foundation but he made a convert out of me. I never realized how extensive WPF is, or how it simplifies so many UI design tasks.
If I had to a pick a favorite from the topics it would have to be Styles and Templates. Wow! Powerful stuff.
We are going to be using WCF in our next release, no doubt about that, but after seeing WPF I’ve already planned several UI improvements for our existing application and I’ll be using WPF for them.”
See you there!
-Walt
Posted in Uncategorized on February 21, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Tim Sneath is posting a fascinating series, Great WPF Applications, that showcases real applications written to exploit WPF features. I’m guessing that if you are interested in WPF you’ve probably seen most of Tim’s series. If not, here are a couple links
I wanted to create a summary list of all the available WPF applications but Chad Brooks already has. Check it out.
-Walt
Posted in Uncategorized on February 21, 2007| 1 Comment »
Today is the online chat for the WPF and Expression teams. I’ll be there.
Join Microsoft Experts for an Online Chat!
WPF Technical Chat 2
Come and meet the WPF team! We’ll have a collection of the WPF team on hand to answer your technical questions, hear your feedback on what we should be doing in our next release, share great tips and tricks for using WPF, and just generally connecting with one another.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
11:00 – 12:00 P.M. Pacific Time
2:00 – 3:00 P.M. Eastern Time
19:00 – 20:00 GMT
Join the chat room on the day of the chat:
MSDN: msdn.microsoft.com/chats/chatroom.aspx
-Walt
Posted in Uncategorized on February 19, 2007| Leave a Comment »
If you study computer graphics for even a short time you’ll discover acronyms, technical terms and concepts that don’t appear in a line-of-business programmers daily vocabulary. Where can you find information about color theory, animation sprites, pixels, video card specifications and other graphics related technology?
Dr Alvy Ray Smith has been a participant in many of the pioneering companies working with computer graphics. He co-founded Pixar and was director of research at Lucas Film so one can rightly assume that he knows a thing or two about graphics.
He has a number of published articles on his web site that any budding graphics developer should read. All his articles are good. Looking for a starting point? Try his “a pixel is not a little square” article.
Quote
My purpose here is to, once and for all, rid the world of the misconception that hat a pixel is a little geometric square. This is not a religious issue. This is an issue that strikes right at the root of correct image (sprite) computing and the ability to correctly integrate (converge) the discrete and the continuous. The little square model is simply incorrect. It harms. It gets in the way. If you find yourself thinking that a pixel is a little square, please read this paper. I will have succeeded if you at least understand that you are using the model and why it is permissible in your case to do so (is it?).
-Walt
Posted in Uncategorized on February 18, 2007| Leave a Comment »
During the last year I’ve worked on a variety projects. I’ve also worked with a variety of teams, each with their own source control requirements. As a result, I have multiple Team Foundation servers registered in Visual Studio.
Have any idea what happens if you are not logged onto the network when starting Visual Studio? VS tries to connect to the last TFS server. VS can’t find the server, eventually times out and prompts you for the server and credentials. That takes a long time.
I found this little tidbit from Noah Coad today. It’s a simple registry hack that prevents Visual Studio from connecting to TFS on startup.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\TeamFoundation]
"AutoLoadServer"=dword:00000000
-Walt
Posted in Uncategorized on February 9, 2007| 1 Comment »
I’ve used Infragistics components on many projects over the years. Overall I’d have to give them a decent rating. Their treeview alone was worth the price on one project with a very tight deadline.
I wasn’t completely thrilled with their earlier .NET tools however . The Infragistics libraries object structure felt more like it was written for COM consumers. The syntax never felt very .NET-ish. I heard that has changed in their last couple releases but I have no first hand knowledge.
Infragistics invites you to try their NetAdvantage for WPF 2007 Volume 1 – Beta 1 product.
Tools included
Infragistics doesn’t offer an XBAP preview. You can watch the video from TechEd Europe 2006 for a very short view of the carouselPanel in operation.
-Walt
Posted in Uncategorized on February 8, 2007| 1 Comment »
I need your help.
I’ve been asked to speak about WPF and WPFe at several conferences this year. The conference organizers are seeing an upswing in interest in WPF and WPFe. I suspect they are growing in popularity as more designers and developers see what can be accomplished with WPF/WPFe.
I’ve seen how blogs are transforming industries, revitalizing political debate, allowing CEO’s like Mark Cuban to talk directly to their audience without a safety net. Scoble and Shel Israel blogged their book writing process for their business blogging book (Naked Conversations
So imagine that you are at your favorite tech conference. You’ve grabbed a coffee and sweet roll from the food table and sat down with your friends. Andy, who works at a valley startup, has opened the conference schedule and is happily reading the sessions out loud to anyone who’ll listen.
“Look at this.” Andy points to the third page of the handout, “there’s a WPFe talk in twenty minutes.”
Gretchen leans over his shoulder “Lemme see.”
“That sounds a lot more interesting than the ADO.NET talk I was going to”, Jason mumbles through a mouthful of cream cheese danish. “Who wants to go? “
“Are you going to eat the rest of that cookie”
Naveen, who’s been quietly sipping his tea, interrupts “What’s WPFe? ? “What’s so interesting about it”
If you were sitting in a session about WPFe what topics would you like to hear. Add your list to the comments and I’ll see how many of your topics I can fit into my hour session.
-Walt
Posted in Examples, Silverlight, WPFe on February 6, 2007| 1 Comment »
The Game of Life sample that Scott wrote last month is still popular on the Wpfwonderland site. I updated the sample to work with the February 2007 CTP. I can definitely see the performance improvements in the last drop.
-Walt
Posted in Silverlight, WPFe on February 6, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Last week the the February 2007 WPFe CTP shipped. If you play with the CTPs you get used to breaking changes between each CTP versions. The products are not stable and are still in flux so it’s not surprising that namespaces or class names change between drops.
There are a couple breaking changes in the February drop. Microsoft has posted a short article describing the two breaking changes. Unfortunately I think there is a mistake in the article. I updated the Game Of Life sample today to work with the new CTP and could not get it to work based on the syntax in the article. Using the code in the SDK samples worked correctly however.
Here are the relevant bits from the incorrect article (errors in red):
The February 2007 CTP agHost.js file has been updated significantly to:
- Check for installed major, minor, and build-version information of the control.
- Detect supported browser versions.
- Accept required major version, required minor version, and required build parameters to the agHost() function.
The new function signature is the following:
function agHost(
hostElementId,
id,
width,
height,
backgroundColor, sourceElement,
source,
isWindowlessMode,
reqMajorVer,
reqMinorVer, reqBuildVer,
framerate,
errorHandler)This new agHost.js file creates two breaking changes that will require changes to Web sites that are built with “WPF/E”.
- The updated function signature contains new arguments: reqMajorVer, reqMinorVer, reqBuildVer. Each
<javascript>block that creates a “WPF/E” (Silverlight) control using agHost.js will require these new parameters. The version number for the February 2007 CTP is as follows:
- Major = 0
- Minor = 8
- Build = 5
So, to specify the February CTP as the required minimum version, you should pass ‘0’, ‘8’, ‘5’ for the reqMajorVer, reqMinorVer, reqBuildVer arguments, respectively.
- You must replace the December CTP SDK agHost.js file with the February CTP SDK agHost.js file, in order for your Web site to work with the February CTP runtime. The agHost.js file that was released with the December CTP was hard-coded to check for a previous version of “WPF/E” on the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. Therefore, the December agHost.js cannot recognize the February CTP, and will continually point users to download the new version. Note also that the December CTP runtime will expire on February 18, 2007, and users must upgrade to the February CTP in order to continue viewing “WPF/E” content.
The new agHost.js file that ships with the February CTP now accepts a minimum version as a variable, and will be compatible with future versions of the “WPF/E” plug-in.
<script type='text/javascript'>
new agHost("wpfeControlHost",
"wpfeControl", // ID of the WPF/E ActiveX control we create
"1024", // Width
"530", // Height
"black", // Background color
null, // SourceElement (name of script tag containing xaml)
"xaml/piano.xaml", // Source file
"false", // IsWindowless,
"24", // MaxFrameRate
null, // OnError handler (method name -- no quotes)
0, // Minimum major version required
8, // Minimum minor version required
5); // Minimum build required
</script>
-Walt
Posted in Uncategorized on February 5, 2007| 2 Comments »
Weathernew.com has a nice scrolling map of the earths weather on their home page. Up until recently this map was a flash application. This week they revealed their new WPF XBAP version of the map.
Both Flash and WPF version have these features
The WPF version adds one feature that I didn’t see on the Flash version though. Click the button marked in the screen shot below and the map will morph from a flat view to a 3D globe view!
Here are the links to the WPF and Flash versions. Compare for yourself.
WPF http://www.weathernews.com/wpfglobal.xbap
FLash http://weathernews.com/index3.html
-Walt
Posted in Uncategorized on February 1, 2007| 4 Comments »
Yes, it’s not a WPF topic but I wasted two hours trying to install Infopath 2007 and was stalled by Beta stupidity. Perhaps it will save someone else the trouble.
Today, I tried to install Infopath 2007. I was immediately stopped with this message.
The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies.
Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.
I looked through the Control Panel Add/Remove programs and didn’t see any obvious Office 2007 betas. I rarely install Betas on my laptop, because I don’t like fussing around with leftover junk from bad uninstallers. As you’ll see, that’s exactly what the problem was.
Apparently I installed the ‘Office 2007 Add-in – Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS (Beta)’ as some point. When I installed Office 2007 RTM the installer did not complain. I do remember going to the Office 2007 website a couple weeks ago to install the Save as XPS addin. Apparently the RTM version of the addin, installed over top of the beta and left all the beta crud in the registry.
After the failed install attempt I spent some time looking for the beta and not succeeding. I decided to look for an install log.
In C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Temp I found the SetupExe(datetime).log file. Your datetime value will be different of course. Opening the log file I found the error message shown above. Immediately before the error I found this text.
Catalyst beta product conflict check failed. Office Beta product conflict is detected on the computer, productcode={30120000-00B2-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE}
Opened up Regedit and did a quick search for the GUID and found the following:
Ahhhh. Look at that UninstallString value. That’s’ what I’m looking for.
Open a command prompt, run the following and the problem is solved!
MsiExec.exe /X{30120000-00B2-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE}
-Walt
Posted in Examples, WPFe on February 1, 2007| 2 Comments »
You’ve installed the February 2007 CTP already haven’t you? If not go here (Windows, Mac) ) and do it now.
WPFe just gets better and better. Plus decent sample applications are starting to show up and their WOW factor is high.
Http://www.vista.si is a new Vista simulator site developed with ASP.NET AJAX and WPFe. You can move windows, see the glass look of Vista, run media player and lots more within the simulator. Not impressed yet. Run the site in Firefox. Yep. Still works!
Two different versions of the simulator on the start page.
Simulated start menu, complete with Aero glass
In this window
Check out the site http://www.vista.si/main.htm
-Walt
Posted in Silverlight, Uncategorized on February 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »
You may have heard… Microsoft goofed!
Their WPFe(Silverlight) December CTP timed out early. If you go to a WPFe site, like the popular Game of Life page on our servers you will get an error message. That’s an easy fix.
I hear from Joe Stegman that there are some nice improvements to WPFe.
Unfortunately the CTP changes break some existing WPFe examples including the ones on our site. I’ll post more, when I figure out what the correct steps are to fix the old WPFe pages
-Walt
WPF Wonderland 