20 Oct 08 - Interesting Stuff

WPF & UX finds

Karl Shifflett has a good blog about WPF matters, and has developed what looks to be a useful set of XAML Power Toys - http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/xaml-power-toys/ and http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/xaml-power-toys-34-released/

On Codeplex there's a Microsoft project for a  Health Common User Interface http://www.codeplex.com/mscui/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=18361

The Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines (UX Guide) has been updated for ribbons, touch, pen and printing - see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/aa511258.aspx

The guys at Querdenker Software have posted their WPF helpers, etc on Codeplex - so might be worth a look - http://www.codeplex.com/qdframework

Joel Bennett has posted code to allow a WPF window to snap to the screen edge - http://huddledmasses.org/wpf-windows-that-snap-to-screen-edges/

Michael Wasserman has posted his Touchless SDK on Codeplex.  This allows a webcam to be used as an input device to for instance track the movement of a physical object - see http://visualstudiomagazine.com/news/article.aspx?editorialsid=10303 - and http://www.codeplex.com/touchless

Windows 7, SQL Server & .NET stuff

Scott Hanselman has compiled a list of T4 templating resources, and asks why more people are doing code gen from templates Codesmith style - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/T4TextTemplateTransformationToolkitCodeGenerationBestKeptVisualStudioSecret.aspx

The Parallel Programming team are gearing up for their offerings being released as part of .NET 4.0 - http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/archive/2008/10/10/8994927.aspx

The gos seems to be that Windows 7 will be here much sooner than most might expect.  Here's yet another teller of this story - http://uxevangelist.blogspot.com/2008/10/windows-7-development-process.html.  This lines up with what a colleague who now works for Microsoft has been hinting at.

The RTM for Microsoft Sync Framework v1.0 has been released - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c88ba2d1-cef3-4149-b301-9b056e7fb1e6&displaylang=en.  So what will the Armenian steak lovers think of it?

Pinal Dave has an intro article - Simple Example of CLR Stored Procedure - http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2008/10/19/sql-server-introduction-to-clr-simple-example-of-clr-stored-procedure/

And finally there's release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Report Builder 2.0 - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9f783224-9871-4eea-b1d5-f3140a253db6&displaylang=en.  From the download page:

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Report Builder 2.0 delivers an intuitive, Office-like report authoring environment enabling business and power users to leverage their experience with Microsoft Office 2007 products. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Report Builder 2.0 supports the full capabilities of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services including:

• Flexible report layout capabilities of SQL Server 2008 Report Definition Language

• Data Visualizations including charts and gauges

• Richly formatted textboxes

• Export to Microsoft Office Word format

Features specific to Report Builder 2.0 are focused on simplifying the process of creating and editing reports and queries and include the following:

• Easy to use wizards for creating table, matrix and chart data regions

• Support for directly opening and editing reports stored on the report server

• Support for using server resources such as shared data sources

• Query designers for multiple data sources including a Microsoft SQL Server-specific query designer