Rants Tagged with “WPF”
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Part 2 of the my Avalon WPF DataBinding Article has gone live on MSDN. If you missed part 1, its here.
My new Avalon WPF DataBinding Article has gone live on MSDN. Take a look. Part 2 will be published next week.
Sean Gerety is going to be doing a "Coffee Talk" to discuss WPF, Cider and Sparkle at Five Seasons Brewery. If you're interested in seeing where the Next Gen User Experience is taking us, stop by and talk about it.
I had a great time tonight talking about all things XAML at the Atlanta Visual Basic Study Group. There were plenty of interesting questions and it's clear the Cider and Sparkle have come a long way, but still have a way to go. It was interesting to see how many people seemed to still tie WinFX with Vista and machine upgrades. I am glad to see how well everything runs on my XP boxes.
I was also a bit perplexed at the XAML code that we could generate with Sparkle (including samples) but Cider simply choked on. But since this is Cider's debut I can't be that hard on it.
Overall I think it was a good night to get people thinking about the next gen of smart clients.
For attendees looking for a copy of the presentation, see this link:
http://wildermuth.com/presentations/avalon.ppt
I spent my first couple of hours with Cider this evening. Cider is the VS 2005 designer for
XAML and
WPF applications. I have to say, most of the feel was very much like traditional WinForms development. I am very impressed. I've been looking at
XAML so long it was kinda strange being able to create it with drag-n-drop. I think the hardest thing for people to get used to is the container support. But many many apps will end up just using the Grid, but I hope to get people to look at the other containers more as they have a lot of usefulness in the long run.
I don't do enough book reviews on this site, but I felt that this book has influenced me enough to say something. Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths have a great book on their hands. I enjoyed the "Hello Avalon..." approach to the early chapters, but this book really helped me delve into the the tricky details of XAML data binding, animation and click-once deployment of WPF apps. I tend to not finish reading most technical books because they are written as references, not books. This book takes the departure and is actually readable. Chris and Ian are both masters of a story-driven approach to technical writing that I really enjoy. If you want to understand what WPF is all about or are using XAML in new projects, pick up this book.
Recommended...
I used to think it would be awesome if everyone would make their help files integrate into
Visual Studio's MSDN Help...but after the 50th component to do it, my help is so overwhelmed that even the filtering seems mucked up. I sure wish I could change my mind and tell every 3rd party component to ask me before they do the merge...
Here is my first Avalon application. Its a Font Browser that shows all the fonts, allows you to specify a test phrase and size and will show Font alternates for a particular font, though I don't have any font's with alternates so I couldn't see this in action ;)
It does require the 2.0 Beta Framework and the Beta 1 Avalon package to be installed, but that's not much of a price to pay.
Here's what it looks like:
It's not finished yet, but I am working on a Font Browser using Avalon. It's fun to work with XAML and code-behind, but without splitter or treeview controls its hard to make something really fun. I am also working on a database browser with Avalon, but until I find a tree view that project is dead.
I will post the font browser this weekend.
I have started to dig into the Beta 1 of Avalon now that I have a bit of free time and a couple of article commitments. I was surprised to find that there isn't an Avalon solution for something like a tree view yet. If I have time, i'll be writing one...otherwise maybe
Microsoft will notice the big hole and patch in later betas. If anyone knows of a project like this, please let me know.
