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Monthly Archives: July 2010

  • Last Night's Ultimate PC Live Bench Build

    Last night, I (with help from you all) did a prototype bench build of the Ultimate Dev Machine 2.0. I made some dumb mistakes (like forgetting to remove the plastic from the bottom of the heat sink; glad I remembered before I powered it up), but it went reasonably well. Highlights Bunch of interested folks on ustream, all watching progress and helping out. That was awesome. Thanks to ever...

    Published Friday, July 30, 2010 | Tagged: , | 3 comments

  • The Ultimate Developer Machine 2.0

    Scott Hanselman and I have been doing parallel builds of the ultimate developer machine. Here's the summary of the new bits I bought for this build. I already own the locally bought stuff. The NewEgg items will be here this week. Category Purchased Price OS Windows 7 x64 Prices vary Video Card Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD 5850 (NewEgg) $345 Processor Intel i7-980x 3.33ghz 6core Pr...

    Published Wednesday, July 28, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 4 comments

  • Silverlight in Action Book Update

    Silverlight 4 in Action, Revised Edition is almost complete. I've turned in all 25 chapters plus appendix, and had them go through editorial review, tech review, and copy editing. All the images are in-place. All that's left is for me to finish writing the front matter (About this Book, Acknowledgements, Preface) Though we haven't updated the page count on the Manning site and Amazon yet...

    Published Tuesday, July 27, 2010 | Tagged: , | 5 comments

  • Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools Walkthrough

    We recently released a new version of the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools. If you spend most of your day in Visual Studio like most of us do, you'll really appreciate some of the features this kit offers. Installation To install the power tools, visit the Gallery Page and click download to grab the .vsix installer. Make sure Visual Studio instances are closed, then open the vsix. ...

    Published Monday, July 26, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , | 8 comments

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup 034 for 7/26/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #34. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Silverlight, Visual C++, XNA, Expression Blend, Surface, Windows 7, Windows Forms, Windows Phone and Visual Studio, sometimes even a little jQuery and HTML5. If you have something interesting you've done or have run across, or you b...

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

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 7/17/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #33. A little early this week The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Silverlight, Visual C++, XNA, Expression Blend, Surface, Windows 7, Windows Forms, Windows Phone and Visual Studio, sometimes even a little jQuery and HTML5. If you have something interesting you've done or ...

    Published Saturday, July 17, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • Silverlight in Action: Chapters are Complete!

    Today, I completed the last chapter in my book, Silverlight in Action Revised Edition by Manning. I have one chapter still in tech review, but authoring the chapters is now complete. Phew! The book, before any image resizing or print layout, has ended up at 819 pages. The page count in Word and the book page count are usually in the same ballpark. Add in the intro materials, toc, and index...

    Published Friday, July 16, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 12 comments

  • Announcing Windows Phone 7 Tools Beta

    Today we released the beta tools for Windows Phone 7. This is a strong, solid beta, just about feature complete. Heck, I'd almost consider it more of an RC when it comes to quality. If you've been waiting for a solid build before diving into wp7dev, this is the release for you. The Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta includes the following: Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone Beta ...

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

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 7/12/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #32. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Silverlight, Visual C++, XNA, Expression Blend, Surface, Windows 7, Windows Forms, Windows Phone and Visual Studio, sometimes even a little jQuery and HTML5. If you have something interesting you've done or have run across, or you b...

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

  • Silverlight in Action Book Excerpt: Creating a Custom Panel

    This is an unedited, raw, excerpt from chapter 24 of my book, Silverlight in Action. The chapter as a whole covers creating custom panels and controls. This excerpt covers creating a custom layout panel which arranges items in a circular or orbital fashion. 24.1 Creating a Custom Panel In chapter 6, I covered the layout system. In that system, the primary responsibility for positioning and s...

    Published Thursday, July 08, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 7 comments

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 7/5/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #31. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Silverlight, Visual C++, XNA, Expression Blend, Surface, Windows 7, Windows Forms, Windows Phone and Visual Studio. If you have something interesting you've done or have run across, or you blog regularly on the topics included here,...

    Published Monday, July 05, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 comments

  • Silverlight/WPF: Don't name elements unless you have to: why x:Naming everything is bad

    XAML, much like HTML, doesn't require naming every element in the markup. This is a *ahem* marked difference from the client app dev technologies we've had in the past, like Windows Forms and various forms of VB. In fact, just about every client-side app dev technology, except maybe dialog resources in Win32, has required that I provide a name for every on-screen element that is backed up by...

    Published Friday, July 02, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , | 17 comments

  • Silverlight.TV with John Papa and Me!

    When I was on campus in May, John and I recorded an episode of Silverlight.TV. Topic was Silverlight printing and reporting, including the codeplex project I created at http://silverlightreporting.codeplex.com. John's Silverlight.TV show is an awesome way to pick up both news and info on Silverlight, and quick nuggets of information. Thanks to John for taking the time to interview me for t...

    Published Thursday, July 01, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 3 comments

  • How'd they build that? Using Snoop and WPF Inspector to peek inside WPF Apps

    Sometimes, you want to check out how your application is structured at runtime. All those nested controls and elements can be hard to visualize when working in code, markup, or designer. Sometimes you need to see the applied values from styles (this is one thing I use IE and Firefox dev tools for with HTML/CSS all the time) Sometimes, you want to just ... er... borrow someone else's ideas. :) ...

    Published Thursday, July 01, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 5 comments