CodeGallery – the Unknown Code Sharing Site

Are you a .NET developer?  If so, I bet you are familiar with CodePlex.com.   CodePlex has been around for several years.  There are thousands of projects hosted on CodePlex, some have a very active developer community working on project improvements.

CodeGallery

There is lesser known Microsoft code sharing site called CodeGallery.  What if you just want to share code? Do you have a project where you don’t need to collaborate with other developers?  This is the main idea behind CodeGallery.

MSDN Code Gallery is your destination for downloading sample applications and code snippets , as well as sharing your own resources.

Code Gallery is a community-enabled Web site where you can share developer information and resources such as sample applications and code snippets. CodePlex is Microsoft’s open source project hosting Web site. Code Gallery is a pure storage site, with no project management capabilities. If you need to manage a live code project, CodePlex is a better choice.

Adding code to CodeGallery

The first step is create an account on CodeGallery.  Next you will be presented with the Create New Resource Page’ screen.

Once your project is create you can change a number of settings.

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LINQ – Get members on type (not base types)

The more I use LINQ the more I love the power it brings to my code.  Whenever I find my self looking at a enumerable type or method I’m curious how I can query the information.

Case in point.  I needed to find only the properties on a type that are declared in that type, not in any of the base types. This simple LINQ snippet delivered the solution.

Type t = typeof(System.String);
var q2 = from prop
         in t.GetProperties()
         where prop.DeclaringType == t
         orderby prop.Name
         select prop;

 

' In Visual Basic
Dim t As Type = GetType(System.String)
Dim q2 = From prop In t.GetProperties() _
                 Where prop.DeclaringType Is t _
                 Order By prop.Name _
                 Select prop

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LiveMeeting – Use Office 2007 to create a FlowDocument

A couple months ago I hacked together a quick prototype that converts a Microsoft Word Document to FlowDocument.  It uses XSLT to convert the Word ‘Open XML’ to the FlowDocument XAML.  The prototype is very rough and I never finished it.  I have it on my task list , but it hasn’t moved very high on my list.

Better Version

Michael S. Scherotter, a developer evangelist at Microsoft, finished his Word to FlowDocument converter.  The source code isn’t released yet but he has scheduled a LiveMeeting on November 29th 11:00 AM to show you this new tool.  It it implemented as a Office Ribbon Add-in and he will release the source code after the 29th.

Details about the show

This is great news.  The flow document API in WPF is a excellent way to create and show good looking documents.  Unfortunately there isn’t any good WSYWIG editing tools to create your flow documents.  If it is easier for customer to use Word to write and save flow docs then we are more likely to see them in use.  I hope Microsoft takes this Add-in and does a ‘LiveWriter‘ on it (put some resources behind it to make a releasable product).

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Improved WPF Intellisense in Visual Studio 2008

After spending many months fighting the Visual Studio 2005 XAML editor it is nice to work in VS 2008

There are lots of little extras in Visual Studio 2008. Here is a nice improvement in the XAML editor. When adding an xmlns attribute (mapping) there is a dropdown showing your project and all the .NET assemblies.  Picking an item from the list will stub in the correct XAML.  Once you have the namespace mapped you get Intellisense when using the tag.

-Walt Ritscher

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Feature specification for Visual Studio 2008

I’m using Visual Studio 2008 more and more each week.  It’s installed side by side with VS 2005 on my primary laptop and I’m going to start using it for my WPF presentations.  Until recently all my presentation have been on either VS 2005 or on VS 2008 running in a virtual machine.

There is a lot to like in the new IDE.  Yes, there are a few annoyances too.  The XAML editor window no longer stubs in the end tag when entering an element.  It also doesn’t enter the two quote marks when adding an attribute to an element.  Both these omissions drive me crazy.  The good news, from Mark Boulter on the Cider team, is that these issues will be fixed before the next interim release.

Design Specs

I found this link today.  It is a Microsoft site that list some of the design specs for the Orcas project.  BTW, all the docs are in the new high fidelity XPS format.

Quote from Visual Studio Settings Migration document

Many features in Visual Studio expose “control points” which allow some aspect of that feature to be customized by the user via some UI. A typical example of this is the options exposed in Tools Options (e.g. Fonts and Colors, Keyboard mappings, editor preferences and much more). Furthermore, aspects of the user interface can be customized, such as toolbars, window layouts, etc. These settings are persisted across sessions so that the next time the user launches their IDE, the “state” of their IDE is restored. This experience is critical to developer’s productivity, since it affects almost every aspect of their interaction with the IDE. Visual Studio also ships with a set of canned Settings (called “Profiles”) which customize the IDE out of the box to suit specific developer personas. Over time users change these default settings as part of their daily use of the IDE. 

Since Orcas is intended to be a “zero impact” upgrade experience from Whidbey, it is important that we provide a mechanism by which the user’s current Whidbey settings can be applied to their Orcas IDE, thereby providing a familiar environment in which to continue their work.  

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I’m speaking at Bay.NET User Group on Aug 21, 2007

It’s turning out to be a busy month for WPF and me. Last week I was at Devscovery Redmond.  This upcoming week I’m going to be in Silicon Valley. I’ve scheduled a WPF talk during the week at the Bay.NET User Group.   Later this month I’ll be teaching my WPF course at Microsoft.  Plus I’ve got a couple other WPF commitments in August that I’ll tell you about later.

A couple weeks ago Oliver Nguyen emailed me and asked if I could give one of my WPF talks to the Bay.NET group.  It turns out I’m going to be in the Bay area in August so I agreed to give my ‘WPF – Microsoft’s Magnificent New Graphics Engine’ talk. Bay.NET UG asks that you register prior to coming to the event.  See this page for more details.

See you there.

I’ll be in Silicon Valley from  8/19 – 8-24.  Any interesting events happening while I’m in town?

Note: The Bay.NET registration page doesn’t appear to be working.

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CLR has been unable to transition from COM context for 60 seconds

I was talking to John Robbins about debugging .NET applications today during lunch at Devscovery.  He answered a question I had about the infamous ‘CLR has been unable to transition from COM context … for 60 seconds’ error. 

This occurs for me when using a Debugger.Break statement in my Winform code while demonstrating examples during a workshop.  One fix for the problem is to go to the Debug -> Exceptions -> Managed Debug Assistants  menu in Visual Studio and uncheck the ContextSwitchDeadlock

I already knew about this Managed Debugging Assistants checkbox and had unchecked it in the past.  The big revelation for me was that this setting is saved in the abc.suo file and is not a global Visual Studio setting.  That means I have to remember to change this for every project I use in my classes!   

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I’m speaking at Devscovery Redmond

Tomorrow (August 14, 2007) is the first day of Devscovery.  This conference is presented by the Wintellect crew and it looks like it will be full of great content.  I’m biased, of course, because I’m one of the speakers.  But check out the agenda for yourself.

What’s the first thing you notice?  Mark Russinovich is giving the keynote.  That’s a good reason to come to the event don’t you think?

Next I see that Jeffrey Richter has an all day workshop called Multicore CPU Revolution: Architecting and Building Responsive and Scalable .NET/C# Applications and Components.  Jeff _loves_ threading.  Just ask him, he’ll tell you.  You can read about threading in his Concurrent Affairs column for MSDN magazine or experience it first hand at Devscovery.  He’s also talking about C# 3.0.

What else is on the agenda? Jeff Prosise, Bryan Sullivan and Jason Beres have a number of talks about Silverlight.  Prosise also has a few talks on ASP.NET and AJAX. John Robbins, Mr. Debugger, will show you the secrets of profiling, debugging and performance tuning your code.

Scott Seely has a ton of things to say about WCF and Paul Mehner will show you how to use Windows Workflow.

What about me? I’m talking about WPF.  Are you surprised?  I’ve got four sessions in which I try and cram as much WPF information into your head as is humanely possible.

There are still some seats available.  Cost is $900 for three days.  You can register online or just show up at the Microsoft Conference Center at  8:00 AM tomorrow.

 See you there?

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It’s official now! Expression Blend to be included in MSDN subscriptions.

Microsoft has received a steady chorus of requests from the MSDN crowd.  “Please include Expression Blend in MSDN!”.  We’ve lobbied long and hard and Microsoft listened.  Today Microsoft announced that both Expression Web and Expression Blend will be in MSDN.

Excellent news!

From Soma Somasegar

 

Based on this feedback, I am pleased to say that we will be making Expression Blend and Expression Web available to all MSDN Premium subscribers shortly after the release of Expression Studio (Q2 2007).  Expression Blend and Expression Web are intended to help creative professionals collaborate with developers to create rich user experiences for the Web, Windows Vista applications and beyond, which means we need to make sure both tools are readily available to our developer community.

The decision extends to all MSDN Premium subscribers, including those with Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Team Editions.  For customers that have premium subscriptions to Visual Studio Team Suite, we will be making the entire Expression Studio available to them.

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Windows Vista – WPF development and testing

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

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Turn the pages on British Library archives – WPF showcase

Today is Vista launch day.  You may be excited by the prospect of running Vista on your computer or you may think it’s a ho-hum moment.  I’m excited though.  Every computer shipping with Vista installed is gaining a powerful new UI rendering engine, whether the consumer knows it or not.

I’m even more excited that Tim Sneath is publishing a series called ‘Great WPF Applications’.  He’s planning on showing all the interesting WPF applications that have crossed his path during the last  year.

Many of these WPF applications have been in stealth mode during development.  The result of this cone of silence is a skewed perception that WPF  is not ready for prime time or that no one is using WPF to build rich UI applications.  That’s unfortunate, but I think the perception is about to change.

Tim’s first article in the series features a beautiful book viewing platform written for the British Library.  Read Tim’s article, he explains a lot about the application, who wrote it, what unique problems they had to solve, the benefits provide by WPF and so on.  BTW the complete app was written in 3 months.

Take me to the Turn the Page application

-Walt

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Creating product demos with WPF and XBAP

A couple days ago I wrote about the free WPF datagrid component from Exceed.  This is good news for WPF developers for a couple reasons.  One, we get a practical datagrid to use in our applications.  Two, the datagrid is a good showcase for WPF.  We can see what kinds of components can be written in WPF.

I think it’s good PR for Xceed too.  By getting a working WPF component out early and giving it away for free they gain market share and mindshare in the WPF community.

The idea

I was thinking about this the other night when I was struck by a new thought. It lit my mind like a streak of lightning sizzling across the moonlight sky. Zzzaap!

 

  –XBAPs are the perfect way to demo your WPF product–

 

If you haven’t seen the Exceed demo yet I recommend  that you check it out and see for yourself what they have done.  Exceed’s XBAP demo is a suburb way to show off their new product.  Its more than just code.  Its interactive, which is better than watching a video.  It nudges you along the demo path with informational balloons and pointers. Go see what I mean.

It’s a brilliant use of  WPF technology. I’m suggesting that you consider the same for your product.

The problem

Your company builds tools for WPF developers.  You want to show the world how nifty your latest WPF tools are.  What are your options?

• Create a demo app and distribute on DVD at trade shows and conferences
• Give away free copies of your software with SDK demos
  • Time cripple the app
  • Limit features in app
• Film a Videocast of the application demo and post on your website and other video sites
• Hire a Flash team or Adobe Director company to build an interactive demo
• Attempt a web-based demo

XBAP solution

Xaml Browser Applications (XBAP) are full featured WPF applications.  There are a few differences between them, which I’ve listed here, but XBAPs can do nearly everything that a standalone WPF application can do. That is what makes this so intriguing.  You can showcase your product – via WPF and deploy the demo via the browser.

So what do you do? Now you want to build and deploy an XBAP demo:

• Have your demo gods whip up a WPF demo (XBAP) that shows off your tools finest features. 
• Make the UI for the demo, the marketing screens, the information and sales pages, beautiful and compelling via the rich WPF graphics engine. 
• Upload the XBAP to your webserver.
• Invite your customers to experience your latest release.

Limitations

There are a couple caveats.

1. Your customer must have the .NET 3.0 runtime  installed.
2. Your customer has to visit your demo site with Internet Explorer.

How big a limitation is this really? Let’s think about this for a second.  You are trying to sell your toolset to the WPF community.  What are the chances they would have .NET 3.0 installed already?  Very high, I bet. How many of them have IE?  A better question would be how many of them use Firefox.  Probably a high number, but to use your demo they could switch to IE for a few minutes.

I see so much potential for this idea.   If you are selling WPF tools you really should consider XBAP demos.

-Walt

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First WPF 3D short film debuts on your local computer screen

Would you like to see an odd little movie?  Japanese design house Bascule released the first ever short film produced with WPF — Dominoken. 

This offbeat little film, featuring a cast of 2D/3D digital actors  follows the trials and tribulations of a Japanese short order cook facing a chaotic night of dominoes, sushi, rice bowls, and more.  Could this be the start of WPF night at the movies?

Show me Dominoken  (must have .NET 3.0 installed)

 

 

-Walt

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Free WPF datagrid component from Xceed

A frequent complaint about WPF from potential WPF adopters is the lack of a real datagrid.  WPF has the powerful layout panel (Grid) but it a  layout element only.  Its real mission is to provide a way for you to organize your UI elements, not show your database data.

Traditionally third parties come along and fill in the gaps in Microsoft product line with control libraries.  Often these libraries are huge and expensive.  There was a lively datagrid market for Visual Basic developers back in the mid ’90s for example.

It looks like the same thing is happening with WPF.  I’ve encountered many commercial component programmers at WPF events and we’re starting to see releases of component libraries.

Free Datagrid

Exceed just released their own WPF datagrid.  I haven’t had time for a full review of the tool yet but it seems to be very useful from the quick overview I had last night.  The best part — the datagrid is free.  This doesn’t appear to be a limited time offer either.  Now you’ve really got no reason to put off adoption of WPF :>

Screenshots

I’ll have a more detailed post later but here are a couple screenshots to keep you happy.

Applying themes to the grid.

Grouping data in grid.

Validation

-Walt

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Latest version of Reflector can dissemble BAML to XAML

I can’t tell you how many .NET developers use Reflector.  But I’d guess it’s about 99.9999999%. Lutz Roeder continuously updates Reflector as new .NET frameworks are shipped. 

XAML Source

When you build a WPF application inside Visual Studio the compiler creates a Binary Application Markup (BAML) file.  This is a binary representation of XAML auto-genned by Visual Studio.  I was happy to hear that Reflector can show me the XAML for these files.

This is great news.

See my more recent post for details on how to setup up Reflector correctly to recognize BAML files.

-Walt

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