July 2010 - Posts
I tweeted a pointer to David Poll’s “To XAML with Love (an experiment with XAML Serialization in Silverlight)” recently. Wanted to make sure I did a short blog post about it, as it is worthy of more than just a quick tweet!
I’m really happy with the progress of the XAML engine in Silverlight. First, Silverlight 4 does a XAML Parse Overhaul, now a XamlWriter.Save for Silverlight from David.
Since you can now Read and Write XAML in Silverlight (like you can do on WPF since v3), that opens many scenarios where XAML may be useful.
Perhaps:
Please give David feedback on his experiment with XAML Serialization.
(oh, and thanks to David for putting his passion for great software into this experiment!)
As always, love to see Silverlight/WPF community members publish info about their successes. Even better is when they share components, best practices, and fill in developer experience holes.
Michael “The Synergist” Scherotter has published about 2 of his contributions this month:
1) Word to XAML Converter Updated – supports WPF4/Silverlight4, integrates into Word
2) ValueConverter item template for VS published and available as VS Extension for Silverlight or WPF.
Thanks!
Top10/(and link to the top 50) movies for kids from British Film Institute: http://www.bfi.org.uk/education/conferences/watchthis
Found another site talking about movies, etc…: CriterionCast.com: http://criterioncast.com/2009/12/21/criterion-on-netflix/
As a guy who fantasizes about having a car-boat, these foot-gloves look exciting! A bit weird, but cool…
Although I have several great ideas for phone apps, I don’t currently have the time to be exploring them. Many of my coworkers are much more deeply involved in the Silverlight for Windows Phone efforts.
Recently a beta of the tools was released, and Long Zheng of IStartedSomething.com posted a nice video walkthrough of many of the UI pieces of Windows Phone 7, as seen in the emulator that ships with the tools.
The video is 8.5 minutes long, but appears to be a good peek into the software experience: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20100713/windows-phone-7-sdk-beta-emulator-walkthrough/
As aficionados of WPF/Silverlight, I’m interested to hear what WPF apps and/or Silverlight apps you would demo to application teams across Microsoft. If you were doing the demo, what apps would you use to make the most compelling cases for use of WPF/Silverlight?
What apps built in WPF or Silverlight are great examples of where you would like to see more Microsoft software going towards? Or are just amazing demos…
(we have an internal demo day coming up, and I figured the list you help come up with would be better than the list we just do internally…I discover significant new software written in WPF almost daily…and your comments will hopefully grow that list as well…)
I kicked a 2 year old email thread with the ClickOnce team in late June to see if ClickOnce support on CodePlex was still in the plan. They said it was going to ship early July!
They announced the release yesterday:
How to deploy your codeplex project with clickonce
If you have a codeplex project (WPF or Windows Forms), please go take advantage of it. If you have a favorite project that you’d like to be able to install more easily, please ask the project owners to do it.
In an interesting post about “thoughts on WPF 4 from a novice” which discusses the effort to build MetroTwit, there are a bunch of interesting comments.
My favorite is http://www.istartedsomething.com/20100711/thoughts-on-wpf-4-0-from-a-novice/#comment-128631 where Nelson digs in and gives some great perf tips to the MetroTwit team.
From just looking at MetroTwit in Snoop, it’s still much too heavy visually. You need to optimize your visual tree, and your framerate will go up as a result. For example, there’s no need to have a RichTextBox for *every* item in the List.
Use a DataTemplateSelector and only show the RichTextBox when the mouse is hovered over it. For everything else, use a TextBlock which still maintains the formatting.
There’s also a gratuitous use of Grids where StackPanels would use. Grids are heavier visually than StackPanels, and their Layout passes are much more complex.
Freeze resources, use BitmapCaching where applicable, etc.
WPF has many ways to do things, but generally only a few work really well. It’s inherent in the flexibility of the platform.
How can Microsoft, and other parts of the WPF/Silverlight ecosystem, make it easier to get this kind of feedback for your app?