August 2007 Entries

WPF talk tomorrow: Windows Presentation Foundation, Between Designers and Developers

Reminder: I will be talking in front of the .NET Managed User Group of Switzerland about the collaboration between graphics designers and developers with WPF. All the talk's details can be found here. With the release of the Windows Presentation Foundation UI framework in November 2006, a new collaboration is made possible between graphics designers and software developers. Designers are now creating source code (XAML) instead of Photoshop mockups. On the other hand, developers must learn to delegate...
Print | posted on Posted On Monday, August 27, 2007 1:32 AM | Feedback (0)

Back from Seattle

I was in Seattle (actually in Tacoma) for one week workshop with a firm specialized in WPF, IdentityMine. I spent three days with Jonathan Russ, who is without any doubt one of the most talented developer I ever met, and at the same time a very good man, always ready to take time to discuss ideas or to explain concepts. It was a great week, and my only regret was I couldn't meet Nathan Dunlap and Robby Ingebretsen because they were both out of house. That said, I met other members of the team. After...
Print | posted on Posted On Sunday, August 26, 2007 10:23 AM | Feedback (0)

WPF: Expression Blend 2 and external resources (VS2008 version)

Following a past entry about Blend and external resources, some of you told me that they tried it without success in Orcas. Here is an updated checklist for Orcas, which should solve the problem, I hope. To make things clear: I use the latest version of Expression Blend (at the time of this writing, it's the August CTP of Blend 2). With earlier versions of Blend, it probably won't work as well, if at all. Additionally, it is imperative to use the syntax I describe to "merge" the resource dictionary...
Print | posted on Posted On Monday, August 20, 2007 3:19 PM | Feedback (0)

WPF: Workshop in Tacoma, WA, with IdentityMine

I am thrilled to be here in Tacoma again, second time this year (and overall) after we were given a WPF training by IdentityMine very innovative and specialized firm. These few days with them are going to be devoted to reviewing some of our design choices, discussing ways to make our designers' work easier (making the application "blendable"), etc... So, now it's 3AM and though I went to bed at 9PM last night (flying in from Zurich through London), I can't sleep, so I am taking a short break from...
Print | posted on Posted On Sunday, August 19, 2007 9:55 PM | Feedback (0)

WPF talk: Windows Presentation Foundation, Between Designers and Developers

It's now official: I will be talking about the new collaboration between designers and developers with WPF in front of the .NET Managed User Group of Switzerland. Here is the abstract: With the release of the Windows Presentation Foundation UI framework in November 2006, a new collaboration is made possible between graphics designers and software developers. Designers are now creating source code (XAML) instead of Photoshop mockups. On the other hand, developers must learn to delegate part of their...
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, August 17, 2007 11:27 PM | Feedback (0)

Toyota Prius, someone?

Since my wife stopped work, we've been thinking of selling both our cars (we have a Toyota Previa and a Toyota Yaris (big Toyota fans)) and getting a new one. The Yaris is too small for me and the Previa is too big for my wife, so we're looking for something in the middle. So we're considering a Toyota Prius. It's a hybrid, with both a conventional engine and an electric one. Apparently it's quite popular amongst celebrities in the US, but that's not why we are thinking about it. I quite like the...
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, August 17, 2007 3:13 AM | Feedback (7)

WPF: Expression Blend 2 and external resources

Update: see the checklist for Visual Studio 2008 "Orcas" here. Also available: Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 projects to download. One thing where Expression Blend V2 improved a lot over V1 . This situation is often useful when you want to "skin" an application. In such a case, you can define your UI in a main assembly (for example the EXE), but define all the UI ressources (Templates, Brushes, Styles, etc...) in a ResourceDictionary located in another DLL. WPF allows "importing" resources...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, August 16, 2007 5:17 AM | Feedback (1)

WPF: Getting, sorting and filtering information in pure XAML (well almost)

One question on the WPF forum caught my attention. It was a nice challenge, so I decided to give it a try. It turned out not bad, so I thought I would post it on my website for future reference. The question is: How to display all the cultures in a ListBox, and filter to display only these starting with "en-". Good news is: you can do a lot of that in XAML only. Bad news is: If you want to filter, you need code-behind. I posted a comprehensive example on my website's articles section. It shows how...
Print | posted on Posted On Saturday, August 11, 2007 9:00 PM | Feedback (0)

Designer-Developer week / Talking with Microsoft's Simon Guest

Designer-Developer week I was pretty busy this week, spending most of it in Milano, where we have one of our development teams. We met some of our designers to work on and refine the designer-developer workflow that we will use during our WPF UI development. It was a very interesting week, because we had to learn to speak the same language (we already know each other, so the learning curve was not too big, but still). I called that the designer-ish / developer-ish translation. It's very interesting...
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, August 10, 2007 7:31 AM | Feedback (0)

Porting to VS2008 / New WPF book / Pictures of Sicily

Porting to VS2008 I am working on a few ASP.NET projects I do privately, and had a small issue, which I couldn't debug in VS2005. I decided it was time to give a serious try to VS2008, so I converted most of my private ASP.NET projects to VS2008, and everything wen smoothly. I didn't take any risk, and I chose to continue using .NET 2.0 for these projects, so that only the IDE changes, but not the framework. After a very fast and painless conversion, finding the error was a breeze (I was having problems...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, August 02, 2007 9:40 AM | Feedback (0)

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