Posts Tagged ‘WPF’
Wordpress 2.7 and some other tidbits
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under C#, WPF, Wordpress
Wow, what a difference the Dashboard is. Its a total revamp, and I totally like it. Amazing work these guys put into this Blog CMS.
Today I also experimented briefly with the Extended Desktop feature that comes with some graphics accelerators. I am specifically referring to one that I have running on a HP laptop. What this particular accelerator does is allow you to create an extended desktop, and with that feature you can run the Presenter view in Powerpoint, which basically allows you to run the presentation without the audience seeing the details of the PowerPoint interface. In other words all they get to see is the Slide Show, nothing else of what you are doing. So, I decided to create a little WPF application that has a width greater than the monitor size, and low and behold it overflows onto the other screen. This is interesting for several reasons. Firstly PowerPoint is not great for everything, and one thing it is not good at is displaying data. This often means that if you have an Access Database you will have to write some VBA code to extract that data and display it. So I thought that maybe the other option could be to write a WPF app that displays content on an extended desktop. If that works its quite feasible to write better logic for everthing and actually use relational data.
Sites that use Silverlight
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under ASP.NET, Web Design, Web Development, Web Technologies
How many sites actually use Silverlight? Silverlight is a Microsoft technology that allows you to create rich and dynamic content for the web. The same Silverlight applications can also be used as desktop applications with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). With that in mind I Googled for sites that actually use Silverlight in a live production environment. I already knew of the Hardrock Memorabilia site that uses the Deep Zoom feature. I showed this to some people at work and they were amazed, as was I. So check it out, but be warned you will be required to install a plugin.
So are there other sites that use Silverlight? And if so, what is the quality thereof. I found a site called Nibbles Tutorials which is done entirely with Silverlight. They also have tutorials and samples that you can look at. I found a few more examples on this blog. This site uses Silverlight in a way that allows you to page through books, which is not that new. This site shows a jeep of some kind that you can rotate. Another site allows you to create a valentine’s day card. A museum also used Silverlight and the Deep Zoom effect. Vertigo are the guys who developed the Hardrock Cafe Memorabilia website. They have some Silverlight content as well including a slideshow presentation. Pyramid fashion also use Silverlight.
First experiences with Visual Studio 2008
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under ASP.NET
I attended the Microsoft Mix Essentials ‘08 event on the 26th of June 2008 and got two pieces of trial software, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional and Microsoft Expressions Web. Today I am installing Visual Studio, and it’s taken 20 minutes so far to install. It’s a 2.9 GB install!!
The features I am most excited about is support for Silverlight and WPF as well as intellisense for Javascript and CSS. There are also a few server controls that Brad Abrams demonstrated that I am very excited. One server control in particular allows you to specify the type of markup that should appear in a server control instead of just accepting (or being forced) to live with the markup provided. Gridview controls use tables for layout, and I am pretty sure DataList controls do as well, and the simple fact is that tables are not always desirable.
Light up the Web – Mix Essentials 2008 Review
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under AJAX, ASP.NET, Web 2.0, Web Design, Web Development, Web Technologies
I attended the Mix Essentials 2008 event at Canal Walk (Cape Town, South Africa) today and there were quite a few things that interested me. There were five speakers at the event:
- David Ives – Developer and Platform Strategy Group for Microsoft in South Africa – Microsoft
- Brad Abrams – Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services Team – Microsoft
- Michael Koester – Designer Marketing Manager for Middle East and Africa and Central and Eastern Europe – Microsoft
- Julian Harris – Conchango
- David Pugh-Jones – Microsoft
The event was split into two tracks, a developer track and a designer track, but it generally focussed on Silverlight, and more specifically on two software packages, Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio, and even more specifically it introduced XAML as a common way for these packages to share content between them. XAML, Extensible Application Markup Language is an XML-like language that defines graphic elements in a human readable form that can be used in vector-imaging programs as well as Visual Studio 2008. This gives designers the flexibility to design interfaces without having to worry about programmers not being able to replicate their designs in a programming environment. Julian Harris demonstrated that you can export files from Adobe Illustrator into XAML format and import that XAML into Visual Studio 2008. XAML is also used in the Expression Studio range of products which includes amongst other two interesting products:
- Expression Blend
- Expression Design
Expression Blend is, almost like Adobe’s Flash Studio, which is an IDE that allows you to create WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight applications. WPF is a technology that allows developers (and designers) to create applications that give users a better user experience (UX). Contemporary windows applications generally use square (often mundane) windows, whereas WPF applications allow designers to implement creative graphics into the interface. Rounded corners and transparent backgrounds for instance are used, and because Expression Blend can read and understand XAML, none of a designer’s creative flair is lost. The developer no longer has any excuses to develop interfaces that do not exactly meet the designer’s design.
