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Monthly Archives: April 2010

  • AudioOrchard: Awesome Silverlight app, Interview with Eric Herbrandson

    I'm not a musician, but I've always loved tinkering with synthesizers, sequencers and drum machines. I worked at a music store in high school, so I got to play with all the new toys. Since then, I've bought myself a new synth-related toy every once in a while. Music composition and tracker tools on the web have always been interesting to me. There have been a few different Silverlight...

    Published Friday, April 30, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 comment

  • Ultimate PC 2010

    I need a new PC. My current PC is based around an Intel E8400 45nm dual core chip. I had really good luck overclocking that guy, but performance is still lacking. The drives are dog slow, and the 4gb of memory (it's still running 32 bit so I see only 3.25) doesn't support well having a video encoder running, multiple instances of Visual Studio, and the other things I do as part of my ...

    Published Friday, April 30, 2010 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Saved by Windows 7 UAC and Microsoft Security Essentials

    Today, I visited one of those ad-laden but otherwise legitimate sites with lots of top 10 lists. In this case, it was a list of photos which looked too cool to be real. I got there from a link chain starting at a Lego article on Epic Win which had a link to the original photo which then had a link to similar stuff etc. It was a long chain of sites I normally wouldn't visit, but which wer...

    Published Thursday, April 29, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 14 comments

  • Microsoft Surface: Announcing Online Design and Development Training

    I love the Surface. I want one in my home office. Alas, that isn't going to happen any time soon, but thanks to things like the Surface SDK for Touch for Windows 7, I can play with the cool surface controls all I want. What, you don't know how to develop for Surface? Well, check this out: The Surface team just released a 9 module set of Surface videos showing you how to design and dev...

    Published Wednesday, April 28, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , | 9 comments

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 4/26/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #21. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Surface, Windows 7, XNA, Windows Forms, Silverlight and Windows Phone. If you have something interesting you've done or have run across, please send me the URL and brief description via the contact link on my blog. WPF a...

    Published Monday, April 26, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • Essential Silverlight and WPF Skills: The UI Thread, Dispatchers, Background Workers and Async Network Programming

    I'm starting a occasional series of postings on top things every Silverlight and WPF developer should know. Originally, I was going to make this a top-10 style list, but I'll keep that for my presentations, and instead expand on it here, with one topic per post. This one is about threading in Silverlight. Ok, that subject sounds like a lot, but it's all pretty closely related. ...

    Published Friday, April 23, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , | 34 comments

  • New Channel 9 Video: Josh Blake on NaturalShow Multi-touch in WPF

    With Windows 7, WPF 4, Silverlight 4, and the road paved by our multi-touch handheld devices, Multi-touch is really hitting mainstream. While at MIX10, I spoke with Josh Blake about NaturalShow, his multi-touch not-PowerPoint presentation approach, written in WPF 4. Josh uses multi-touch to navigate through a really clever way of presenting material. I'd try and describe it, but i...

    Published Thursday, April 22, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , | 1 comment

  • Rant: HDTV Has Ruined the LCD Display Market: Or, I want my pixels and DPI now!

    Ok, that's it. I've had it. I want my pixels, damn-it! For a while, screen resolution has been going up on our desktop displays. The trend was good, as I've always wanted the largest monitor with the highest DPI that I could afford. I mean, I used to have one of the first hulking 17" CRTs on my desk. I later upgraded to a 21" inch job that was so huge, that if you didn't stick it in ...

    Published Thursday, April 22, 2010 | Tagged: , | 162 comments

  • Awkward: The Other Microsoft Interview Story

    Now that my friend Frank La Vigne (@tableteer on twitter) is leaving AIS, I can tell the "Awkward Interview Story" I've had to keep secret. This story takes place just a day after my wife and I returned from the hospital from the delivery of our second child, Abby. But we need a little more back story first. History Over the holidays in 2007 and into January 2008, I was contacted ...

    Published Thursday, April 22, 2010 | Tagged: , | 3 comments

  • New Channel 9 Video: Emil Stoychev on the CompletIT Silverlight Showcase Site

    Creating your whole website using Silverlight isn't usually the approach you'll take--unless you happen to be a company specializing in Silverlight development. At MIX10, I caught up with Emil Stoychev, founder of SilverlightShow. His company, CompletIT, located in Sofia, Bulgaria, created a very slick animated website entirely in Silverlight. It has everything from background ani...

    Published Wednesday, April 21, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , | Leave comment

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 4/19/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #20. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Surface, Windows 7, XNA, Windows Forms, Silverlight and Windows Phone. If you have something interesting you've done or have run across, please send me the URL and brief description via the contact link on my blog. Of co...

    Published Monday, April 19, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 2 comments

  • Silverlight and WPF Tip: Fitting items in a ListBox

    One layout issue many folks run into in WPF and Silverlight is the problem of ListBox content not automatically sizing to the width of the ListBox. Using my WPF Twitter Application video as an example, here's a shot with it with the items not fitting correctly. Compare to the second screen shot, and you can see the text has scrolled off the right of the ListBox. Here's a shot w...

    Published Sunday, April 18, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 19 comments

  • New Channel 9 Video: David Kelley on the Next Gen WPF and Silverlight Retail Experience

    At MIX10, I spoke with Wirestone Principal UX Architect David Kelley about a prototype retail experience he's built in WPF and Silverlight. The experience is based around the concept of small updatable product price tags (actually screens) that can both be updated in real-time and react to the presence of a person standing near them. Very cool stuff. I'm always interested in se...

    Published Friday, April 16, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 comments

  • Tip: Anonymous Event Handlers in VB.NET

    Back in 2009, I blogged about using Lambda expressions for async web service calls in C#, using an anonymous method. A comment on that blog tonight requested information on how to do that in VB.NET. It has been about a million years since I wrote VB.NET code, so, I went and learned how to do it. Unfortunately, it appears that the lambda support in VB doesn't allow VB subs. I have it wo...

    Published Friday, April 16, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 10 comments

  • Silverlight 4 Release: Happy Third Birthday, Silverlight!

    I've watched each ctp, beta, and release of Silverlight with delight. I wrote a production application in 1.1a and never looked back. This will be my first Silverlight release as a Microsoft employee, and I'm happy to say it doesn't disappoint. Three years ago today, the name "Silverlight" was officially announced, and the tong-twisting code-name "WPF/E" was no longer. As a 'softie...

    Published Thursday, April 15, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 2 comments

  • New Channel 9 Video: Mime Cloud, Umbraco, WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7

    Content management of images, especially in publication scenarios where multiple crops and sizes of one image must all be available and associated together, is not a simple problem to solve. At Mix10, I caught up with Pete Miller from Conde Nast Digital and Alex Norcliffe from Xeed. (Alex is also on the Umbraco core project team.) We talked about the challenges around content m...

    Published Thursday, April 15, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • Scanning an Image from Silverlight 4 using WIA Automation

    Silverlight 4 Out-of-Browser apps now have the ability to be elevated trust applications, if you request it and your users consent. One of the more powerful features of trusted applications is the ability to use IDispatch COM servers on the local machine. Basically, if you can access the COM object from script, you can access it from Silverlight. That includes everything from Word and E...

    Published Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , | 63 comments

  • New Channel 9 Video: Cory Plotts on Snoop for WPF

    Folks in the WPF world have long relied on Snoop to figure out what the heck is going on in their applications. Originally written by Pete Blois from the MS Expression team, Snoop provides information about all the elements, and even a slick 3D blown-out view of the visual tree. Cory Plotts has taken over Snoop development and added a bunch of enhancements - some his own, and some...

    Published Tuesday, April 13, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 1 comment

  • My First 6 months Working for The Man

    It's hard to believe, but today marks six months of working for Microsoft. It was a long process - one that lasted almost two years from the first contact to the start date, but it was worth it. I started on Monday October 12, 2009. On that first day, I got all my orientation and badge work done by 3:00pm, and then went and found Scott so I could shadow him for a bit. I even made a few...

    Published Monday, April 12, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , | 8 comments

  • WPF 4 Release: A guide to the new features

    April 12 is my 6 month anniversary at Microsoft, and also happens to be the date we've launched .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Congratulations to the product teams who made this release happen! .NET 4 has had a ton of improvements, and Visual Studio 2010 with the new WPF interface and MEF-based plug-in model is an amazing piece of software. Having watched it grow from the differe...

    Published Monday, April 12, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , | 22 comments

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 4/12/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #19. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Surface, Windows 7, XNA, Windows Forms, Silverlight and Windows Phone. If you have something interesting you've done or have run across, please send me the URL and brief description via the contact link on my blog. This ...

    Published Monday, April 12, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • WPF: Binding to Anonymous Types from LINQ

    When doing some writing on Binding for WPF 4, it occurred to me that many folks don't realize that in WPF, we've long been able to bind to anonymous types returned from LINQ statements, as long as we have property names. Here's a quick example that does a product of two lists to generate some test data: XAML <ListBox x:Name="MyListBox"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> ...

    Published Monday, April 12, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 6 comments