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Monthly Archives: May 2010

  • Creating Dynamic Windows 7 Taskbar Overlay Icons

    This is adapted from my recent "Creating your First WPF Application" post. I felt the dynamic overlay was interesting enough to pull out into a separate post. WPF has good integration with the Windows 7 taskbar. One of the more interesting ways to integrate with the taskbar is to show an overlay icon. Most examples of this show how to overlay a static image or some visuals. I wanted to go one...

    Published Saturday, May 29, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 3 comments

  • Creating your First WPF Application: Twitter and Windows 7 Taskbar Integration

    Back in February, I wrote a primer on getting started with WPF, using the Hello World example. Yesterday, as part of my work on the MSDN video series, I created a very different "getting started" example using Silverlight Out-of-Browser and a direct REST service call to search twitter. For the WPF video in that same series, I decided to parallel the work I did on the Silverlight side, and recr...

    Published Saturday, May 29, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 2 comments

  • Expression Studio 4 Launch on June 7th in New York City

    Adam Kinney wrote that Expression Studio 4 will launch at the Internet Week conference in New York City on June 7th. Here's what he had to say about it: Expression Studio 4 will launch at the Internet Week conference in New York City on June 7th! Bill Buxton will be there as our featured guest speaker and many of your other favorite Blenders will be there, too: Christian Schormann Pete B...

    Published Friday, May 28, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , | 4 comments

  • Creating your First Silverlight Client Application: Twitter and COM, of course

    I'm creating some "create your first" videos for MSDN, and thought it would be useful to offer up a text version of the Out-of-Browser one in addition to the video. In this example, we'll build a simple Twitter Search client, using Silverlight out-of-browser mode. I'll also show how to use the Automation (IDispatch) API to load the search results into Microsoft Excel. XAML The XAML for this...

    Published Friday, May 28, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 7 comments

  • Silverlight.net and WindowsClient.net Update: Your Input Requested

    We've been making some small but important changes to the Silverlight.net and WindowsClient.net sites lately. One of the more visible is the use of a larger-sized video player, so you can see more on the screen. At the same time, we took a dependency on Silverlight 4 so we could enable full-screen pinning on the players. That means, you can pin the player on one monitor and continue to work on...

    Published Thursday, May 27, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 16 comments

  • New Connected Show Podcast with Jon Skeet

    My friends up in NYC (Peter Laudati, Dmitry Lyalin) have put out another cool Connected Show podcast, this one on Jon Skeet. You Don't Find Skeet, Skeet Finds YOU! In this episode, the man, the myth, the legend: C# MVP Jon Skeet joins Peter on a whirlwind tour into the bowels of the C# language. Jon talks up lambdas, expression trees, and other C# goodness. Prepare to have your brain tickled...

    Published Thursday, May 27, 2010 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Getting a Job after Graduation Requires More than Just GPA and Resumes

    Ahh, graduation time. I just came back from Redmond and found my 10rem contacts email full of several messages like this: I'm a computer science graduate with a 3.x ... 4.0 GPA, and am looking for a job. Can you help? In my previous life, I hired a number of people, and also helped my clients interview prospective employees. It has been a while since I went to school, but let me tell you ...

    Published Tuesday, May 25, 2010 | Tagged: | 3 comments

  • RIA Services Demo from PDX Code Camp

    The demo I presented at the Portland Code Camp on Saturday was a modified version of Brad Abrams' multi-part RIA Services walkthrough. You can find a full index to the series on Brad's old blog. The completed application is also available from that page. I also used AdventureWorks as the database. You can grab the AdventureWorks sample databases from codeplex.

    Published Tuesday, May 25, 2010 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 5/24/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #25. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Surface, Windows 7, XNA, Windows Forms, Silverlight, Windows Phone and Visual Studio. 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. ...

    Published Monday, May 24, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave comment

  • A Week in the Life of a Community PM at Microsoft

    I spent this week on campus up in Redmond, Washington. While it is always hard on my wife to be a single mom for a week, the time I spend on campus is vital to my role. It's also time I really enjoy. With Tim Heuer having moved over to the Silverlight product team proper, I now split my time between WPF and Silverlight work, with Jesse Liberty and I splitting the load as "the xaml team" in Sc...

    Published Saturday, May 22, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , | 6 comments

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 5/17/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #24. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Surface, Windows 7, XNA, Windows Forms, Silverlight, Windows Phone and Visual Studio. 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. ...

    Published Monday, May 17, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 1 comment

  • More on Image Resizing in .NET 4 vs .NET 3.5sp1: Bilinear vs Fant

    In a previous post, I demonstrated how to use RenderOptions.BitmapScalingMode in WPF to change the quality of the resize of an image. Some folks have questioned why that is necessary when the resizing worked just fine in 3.5sp1 In .NET 4, the default BitmapScalingMode changed from Fant to bilinear for performance reasons. The Fant scaler is CPU-intensive whereas the now default Bilinear is ha...

    Published Sunday, May 16, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 4 comments

  • Your Suggestions Wanted: Silverlight, WPF, WCF RIA Services, ASP.NET Planning

    Did you know about the feature submission and votings sites we run in dev div at Microsoft? Silverlight feature suggestions WPF feature suggestions WCF RIA Services feature suggestions ASP.NET feature suggestions Each of those sites is monitored by community PMs like me, Tim Heuer, Jesse Liberty, John Galloway and Scott Hanselman as well as product team members. I've been personally int...

    Published Friday, May 14, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 comments

  • Musings on the 9-cell grid and its uses in software

    I was exhausted last night, but couldn't sleep. For some reason, I kept thinking about how many places the 9 cell grid (or scale 9 grid as it is called in some uses) 3x3 grid pops up in our work. In its simplest form, the grid is something like this: With the middle center often being optional. Or, put into C#, perhaps a structure or class that looks like this: public class Grid9<T&g...

    Published Friday, May 14, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 3 comments

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 5/10/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #23. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Surface, Windows 7, XNA, Windows Forms, Silverlight, Windows Phone and Visual Studio. 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. ...

    Published Monday, May 10, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • Creating a Simple Report Writer in Silverlight 4

    Over the weekend, I was working on the Printing chapter of my Silverlight 4 Book. As part of that chapter, I decided to build a simple report writer. While there's a lot of other useful stuff in the chapter (buy my book! <g>) I felt the report writer could be very useful to release into the wild. Silverlight 4 Printing API The book chapter goes into great detail on the printing API. I ...

    Published Sunday, May 09, 2010 | Tagged: , | 15 comments