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Monthly Archives: December 2009

  • Looking back at 2009, and forward to 2010

    Like most people, at the end of the year, I look back and assess how things went, what I could do better, and what I want to do in the next year. I hesitate to call them resolutions, as that pretty much guarantees nothing will come of them :) Looking back at 2009 I had a fair number of goals for 2009. The most important one, however, I couldn’t publish anywhere, so we’ll hit that first. Ge...

    Published Thursday, December 31, 2009 | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 comments

  • Returned my Zeo Personal Sleep Coach

    For as long as I can remember, I would always wake up tired. I don’t drink caffeine in the afternoon/evening, so I always figured I would wake a lot during the night due to apnea or something. My wife had recommended that I go visit a sleep clinic. Never one to go see a human when a piece of electronics could tell me almost as much, and leave my medically untrained self to interpret the resul...

    Published Wednesday, December 30, 2009 | Tagged: , | 4 comments

  • One of my other hobbies : Aquaria

    I have way too many hobbies. If I retired today, I’d still be really busy :) Among my hobbies is taking care of the three aquariums in the house. I have my 55 gallon tropical tank upstairs in the transition from the hall to the living room, a 55 gallon goldfish tank in my basement home office, and then my wife has a 20 gallon guppy tank in a corner of the dining room. As the 20 gallon is really...

    Published Wednesday, December 30, 2009 | Tagged: , | 1 comment

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 12/28/2009

    On to Windows Client Developer Roundup #4 for 12/28/2009, the last one of this decade. It’s a brief one, as many folks were away this week. 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. To everyone reading this live, I wish you a Happy New Year! WPF WPF 3d Graph with source (CodeProject – Sa...

    Published Monday, December 28, 2009 | Tagged: , , , , | Leave comment

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 12/21/2009

    On to Windows Client Developer Roundup #3 for 12/21/2009 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. And to everyone reading this live, I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Joyous Holiday Season. WPF Source code for MyBoard (I mentioned MyBoard in the last roundup – awesome WPF app) (co...

    Published Monday, December 21, 2009 | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 comment

  • My latest videos – WPF, Silverlight, Sensors, and PDC09

    Here’s a list of videos I’ve put on various sites lately. The first set includes videos I’ve done for WindowsClient.net, to help folks learn how to build cool applications on Windows. The second set are some of the interviews I did at PDC09, showing cool apps folks have built in WPF and Silverlight. More of both will be coming soon, WindowsClient.net How do I: Use Windows 7 Taskbar Progre...

    Published Friday, December 18, 2009 | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 comments

  • ViewModel Pattern and Speech as UI. Help me Obi Wan, where’s the View?

    When working through the Speech Synthesis post last night, I kept getting a nagging feeling that the speech code I was putting in my ViewModel just didn’t really belong there. The speech was the UI, it was the thing the user actually interacted with, so it smelled wrong to have it in the ViewModel. It felt like I was putting textboxes and button-emitting code inside VM functions. That said, S...

    Published Wednesday, December 16, 2009 | Tagged: , , , , | 5 comments

  • Using Speech Synthesis in .NET 4 and Windows 7

    Computer voice synthesis has come a very long way since the old robotic voices like we heard on Wargames ("Shall we play a game?" in what sounded like slightly British overtones) and other voice synths of the time. From automated voice response to the little GPS receivers in our cars, we expect to hear pretty decent human-sounding words, with gender tones and even accents. Many of u...

    Published Wednesday, December 16, 2009 | Tagged: , , , , | 12 comments

  • Back up your Site/Blog by Crawling it with HTTrack

    If you’re on twitter or otherwise follow Codinghorror, you know he suffered a complete loss of his blog. My site and blog both have nightly database backups, but I’ve never tried to restore them, so they’re untested and therefore only slightly better than useless. I also get concerned sometimes that those backups are of a really old blogging engine’s data, an engine I’d never use again if I we...

    Published Monday, December 14, 2009 | Tagged: , , , | 1 comment

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 12/14/2009

    Here’s another link roundup for Windows Client developers. I often tweet a number of these as I find them, so if you want the links in real-time, follow me on twitter. WPF General Another screensaver with WPF (CodeProject) How can I filter data virtualized items in WPF? (Bea Stollnitz) Snoop, now with 2x the bits! (Snoop 64 it support) (Cory Plotts) How to create a Reverse Prog...

    Published Monday, December 14, 2009 | Tagged: , , , , | 2 comments

  • A K_M Solution (Sharing Keyboard and Mouse between Multiple PCs using Software)

    I have a KVM in my rack in the utility room. It’s great for those times when I have to be at the console of one of my servers. I wanted something similar for my workstation setup. This weekend, I finally got around to cleaning up my home office, and setting up the Dell PC that was sent to me from Microsoft per Scott Hanselman’s request. The importance of an “always connected to Microsoft” PC (...

    Published Monday, December 14, 2009 | Tagged: , , | 7 comments

  • Working with Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail Buttons with WPF 4

    The Windows 7 taskbar has tons of ways that applications can surface unique information or capabilities to make the experience just that much more awesome. The one I’ll cover in this post is Taskbar Thumbnail Buttons, sometimes called the Thumbnail Toolbar. Chances are, more than a few applications that you use include this functionality. Here’s a shot of the Zune app, showing the four thumbn...

    Published Friday, December 11, 2009 | Tagged: , , , | 3 comments

  • Overlaying Icons on the Windows 7 Taskbar with WPF 4

    The Windows 7 taskbar is more than just a place to hold icons for running and pinned applications. Among other things, you can use it to display the progress of a long-running operation and overlay informational icons to indicate a change in application state – the topic of this post.UsesTaskbar overlays can be used to show information to the user that is not critical in nature, but which...

    Published Wednesday, December 9, 2009 | Tagged: , , , | 9 comments

  • Silverlight 4 COM Support and 32/64 bit machines – the C64 Emulator

    My primary development machine at home is still (gasp!) running the 32 bit version of Windows 7. I just haven’t gotten around to paving it to upgrade to 64 bit. My other machines, including my presentation laptop, are all running 64 bit. Prior to PDC, I had made some significant changes to the Silverlight C64 emulator. I added sound, started to add a touch-enabled user interface, fixed up some...

    Published Tuesday, December 8, 2009 | Tagged: , , , | 3 comments

  • Getting ready to relaunch my site on Umbraco CMS

    December is a relatively quiet time at Microsoft, and despite having a bunch of content work to complete, and several chapters to go in my Silverlight 4 book, I felt it would be a good time to give my site a real overhaul. My old site was fractured into two main parts: the legacy asp.net site that had all my pre-blog content, as well as some games, and a bunch of pretty popular desktop wallpap...

    Published Tuesday, December 8, 2009 | Tagged: , , | 4 comments

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 12/7/2009

    Here’s a list of interesting Windows Client Development links I found this past week. In particular, check out the free font site for legally usable fonts for WPF and Silverlight – an excellent find. WPF MSDN: Optimizing Performance: Data Binding (via imapcgeek) MSDN: Optimizing WPF 4 Application Performance (via ramil) Multi-touch in WPF 4 – Part 1 (Anson Tsao) Silverlight / WPF ...

    Published Monday, December 7, 2009 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • 10 Must-See PDC 09 Sessions

    Here are ten eleven sessions from PDC09 that I consider to be must-see sessions. There were tons of other great ones, so it was hard to pare it down to this group. Each video is offered in a few different formats, so it you run into any problems with one format, just click the links under the player to try one of the other formats. Top 10 11 1 CL09 How Microsoft ...

    Published Wednesday, December 2, 2009 | Tagged: , , , , | Leave comment

  • The Future of Client App Dev : WPF and Silverlight Convergence

    Silverlight has come an amazing distance since the initial 1.0 release and 1.1 alpha (controls? who needs controls?) just over two years ago. It’s hard to believe that we’re on Silverlight 4 in such a short time. It’s even harder to believe that each of those releases has been robust and packed full of new and useful features, driven by community feedback. With all the attention given to Silve...

    Published Tuesday, December 1, 2009 | Tagged: , , , , , | 33 comments