Runge Software R&D Blog

Stuff to look at – 09/09/09

2009-09-15T00:21:00.001-07:00

Building WPF and Silverlight Applications with a Single Code Base Using Prism - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee321573.aspx

Hint from Brian Keller that VS2010 beta 2 is coming soon - The keyboard shortcuts below will only work with builds of Visual Studio 2010 post-beta 1. So this is something to look forward to for beta 2, coming “soon”! - http://blogs.msdn.com/briankel/archive/2009/09/08/zoom-in-out-with-visual-studio-2010-editor.aspx

SQL Express surveys - http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/simons/archive/2009/09/08/SQL-Express-Surveys-.aspx

Add DLR console to ASP.NET apps - http://ironconsole.codeplex.com/

Dispelling a WPF/SL myth - http://devlicio.us/blogs/rob_eisenberg/archive/2009/09/08/dispelling-a-common-wpf-silverlight-myth.aspx

SL document toolkit - http://firstfloorsoftware.com/blog/document-toolkit-1-1-rtw/

Josh Smiths’ “From Russia with Love” technique of simplifying the creation of ViewModel objects from other libraries, without compromising your MVVM architecture - http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/FromRussiaWithLove.aspx

What new in WPF Flow Diagrams - http://www.mindscape.co.nz/blog/index.php/2009/09/08/whats-new-in-wpf-flow-diagrams/

Codeplex LIMS system - http://ams.codeplex.com/

Composite Application Guidance for WPF & SL (Prism-v2) C# Snippets with Guidance, Links and Tips

SketchFlow: Global State Behavior Sample - http://electricbeach.org/?p=349

Windows Embedded Preview Based on Windows 7 and .NET Micro Framework 4.0 Goes to Beta!!! - http://blogs.msdn.com/netmfteam/archive/2009/09/04/net-micro-framework-4-0-goes-to-beta.aspx

5 Reasons Why Silverlight Is My Preferred Web Development Platform

Cinch : A Code Generator Is Coming

Marin Fowler on Feature Branching - http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureBranch.html

http://nodexl.codeplex.com/

Stuff to look at – 09/09/09

2009-09-15T00:19:00.001-07:00

Building WPF and Silverlight Applications with a Single Code Base Using Prism - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee321573.aspx

SQL Express surveys - http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/simons/archive/2009/09/08/SQL-Express-Surveys-.aspx

Add DLR console to ASP.NET apps - http://ironconsole.codeplex.com/

Dispelling a WPF/SL myth - http://devlicio.us/blogs/rob_eisenberg/archive/2009/09/08/dispelling-a-common-wpf-silverlight-myth.aspx

SL document toolkit - http://firstfloorsoftware.com/blog/document-toolkit-1-1-rtw/

What new in WPF Flow Diagrams - http://www.mindscape.co.nz/blog/index.php/2009/09/08/whats-new-in-wpf-flow-diagrams/

Codeplex LIMS system - http://ams.codeplex.com/

Composite Application Guidance for WPF & SL (Prism-v2) C# Snippets with Guidance, Links and Tips

SketchFlow: Global State Behavior Sample - http://electricbeach.org/?p=349

Windows Embedded Preview Based on Windows 7 and .NET Micro Framework 4.0 Goes to Beta!!! - http://blogs.msdn.com/netmfteam/archive/2009/09/04/net-micro-framework-4-0-goes-to-beta.aspx

5 Reasons Why Silverlight Is My Preferred Web Development Platform

Cinch : A Code Generator Is Coming

Marin Fowler on Feature Branching - http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureBranch.html

http://nodexl.codeplex.com/

Stuff to look at – 09/09/09

2009-09-08T20:14:00.001-07:00

Building WPF and Silverlight Applications with a Single Code Base Using Prism - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee321573.aspx

SQL Express surveys - http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/simons/archive/2009/09/08/SQL-Express-Surveys-.aspx

Add DLR console to ASP.NET apps - http://ironconsole.codeplex.com/

Dispelling a WPF/SL myth - http://devlicio.us/blogs/rob_eisenberg/archive/2009/09/08/dispelling-a-common-wpf-silverlight-myth.aspx

SL document toolkit - http://firstfloorsoftware.com/blog/document-toolkit-1-1-rtw/

What new in WPF Flow Diagrams - http://www.mindscape.co.nz/blog/index.php/2009/09/08/whats-new-in-wpf-flow-diagrams/

Codeplex LIMS system - http://ams.codeplex.com/

Composite Application Guidance for WPF & SL (Prism-v2) C# Snippets with Guidance, Links and Tips

SketchFlow: Global State Behavior Sample - http://electricbeach.org/?p=349

Windows Embedded Preview Based on Windows 7 and .NET Micro Framework 4.0 Goes to Beta!!! - http://blogs.msdn.com/netmfteam/archive/2009/09/04/net-micro-framework-4-0-goes-to-beta.aspx

5 Reasons Why Silverlight Is My Preferred Web Development Platform

Cinch : A Code Generator Is Coming

Marin Fowler on Feature Branching - http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureBranch.html

http://nodexl.codeplex.com/

25 August 2009

2009-08-24T15:31:00.001-07:00

http://thedatafarm.com/blog/data-access/more-on-oslo-amp-data-programmability-merger/

http://blogs.msdn.com/gduthie/archive/2009/08/20/from-sketchflow-to-production.aspx

http://ferventcoder.com/archive/2009/08/20/uppercut-ndash-mark-an-application-executable-to-use-more-than.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/chrsmith/archive/2009/08/20/f-for-architects-hitting-the-sweet-spot.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2009/08/19/visual-studio-2010-performance-part-3-a-technical-update.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/08/18/all-expression-blend-samples-posted-to-the-expression-gallery.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/08/18/updated-compatible-with-windows-7-software-logo-for-rtm-has-new-ui.aspx

Backlight WPF / SL controls

2009-07-21T20:58:00.001-07:00

Will check out, but some nifty designer focused controls for both WPF & SL at http://blacklight.codeplex.com/

Check out the showcase at http://mightymeaty.members.winisp.net/blacklight.silverlight/

Fri 17th July 2009

2009-07-17T00:30:00.001-07:00

WPF

Josh Smith has created yet another set of tooling for MVVM - http://mvvmfoundation.codeplex.com/

And Sacha Barber has started his own MVVM Framework "Cinch'" & series of articles - http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/Cinch.aspx and http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/CinchII.aspx

http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Creating_a_Range_Slider_in_WPF_and_other_cool_tips_and_tricks_for_UserControls_.aspx

10 July 2009

2009-07-10T21:40:00.001-07:00

Expression Blend 3 & SilverLight 3 go RC

Canadian UX site. Includes a few mini tutorials on Blend / Sketchflow 3 - http://blogs.msdn.com/canux/default.aspx

Expression gallery - samples, etc - http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us

http://www.kirupa.com/blend_wpf/index.htm - Blend / WPF tutorials

Using a Behavior to magnify your WPF applications

http://electricbeach.org/ - Christian Schormann's blog (Blend head honcho)

9 July 2009

2009-07-09T00:49:00.001-07:00

MVVM – Philosophy and Case Studies - Introduction - http://devlicio.us/blogs/rob_eisenberg/archive/2009/07/07/mvvm-philosophy-and-case-studies-introduction.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/granth/archive/2009/07/06/how-do-you-update-all-work-item-type-definitions-on-a-server.aspx

http://vwcmp.codeplex.com/ WPF KB control

http://textfileparsers.codeplex.com/ - text parsing

Check Out the Killer Apps for Surface - http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/07/08/check-out-the-killer-apps-for-surface.aspx + http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/killer-apps-microsoft-surface-complete-guide

Run a build, create some manual tests, run them. Change some code, rebuild and LabTest will recommend which manual tests should be re-run !

http://blogs.msdn.com/densto/archive/2009/06/29/test-impact-walk-through.aspx

Tue 7 July 2009

2009-07-06T16:47:00.001-07:00

Reflections

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/IllustrativeProgramming.html

http://www.codethinked.com/post/2009/07/05/Why-Do-We-Keep-Building-Tightly-Coupled-Software.aspx

WPF

http://blogs.msdn.com/text/archive/2009/06/24/new-wpf-4-0-features.aspx

Charting is in the latest WPF Toolkit - http://wpf.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=29117 and http://blogs.msdn.com/delay/archive/2009/06/25/wpf-charting-it-s-official-june-2009-release-of-the-wpf-toolkit-is-now-available.aspx

http://blogs.southworks.net/dschenkelman/2009/06/27/how-to-drag-and-drop-silverlight-views-between-regions-in-prism-v2/

http://blogs.southworks.net/matiasb/2009/07/02/how-to-hide-views-inside-composite-application-guidance-aka-prism-v2-regions/

http://blogs.msdn.com/msmossyblog/archive/2009/06/30/silverlight-expression-3-australian-tour.aspx

I18N

WPF Localization Guidance Paper Posted on CodePlex

Iron Ruby

http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2009/06/ironruby-tutorial.html

Thu 25 June 2009

2009-06-25T00:39:00.001-07:00

http://blogs.msdn.com/stuart_kent/archive/2009/06/23/so-what-is-a-dsl-anyway.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2009/06/22/announcing-entity-framework-feature-ctp-1.aspx - but don't get excited 'cos we won't see the features in .NET 4.0

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/06/22/application-skinning-in-wpf-and-silverlight.aspx - couple of videos - haven't looked at them

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/06/22/see-the-preview-of-office-2010-the-movie.aspx - ditto - haven't looked at them

http://blogs.msdn.com/alexj/ Includes a series of EF tips

http://blogs.msdn.com/vstsqualitytools/archive/2009/06/21/introduction-to-record-and-playback-engine-in-vstt-2010.aspx

Fri 19 June 2009

2009-06-20T00:16:00.001-07:00

VS2010

http://blogs.msdn.com/vsxteam/archive/2009/06/17/new-editor-samples-for-visual-studio-2010-beta-1.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/mwinkle/archive/2009/06/17/introduction-to-wf-designer-rehosting-part-1.aspx

WPF

http://huddledmasses.org/wpf-in-powershell-powerboots-02/

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/06/18/blend-3-great-feature-2-master-details-screens.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/06/19/deep-zoom-composer-june-2009-preview.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/vsdata/archive/2009/06/18/wpf-data-binding-lookup-tables.aspx

http://devlicio.us/blogs/christopher_bennage/archive/2009/06/19/one-day-with-balsamiq-mockups-a-review.aspx

TFS2010

http://blogs.msdn.com/vstsqualitytools/archive/2009/06/21/introduction-to-record-and-playback-engine-in-vstt-2010.aspx

Workflow 4 and other stuff

2009-06-10T17:07:00.001-07:00

Matt Winkle introduces the updated designer - http://blogs.msdn.com/mwinkle/archive/2009/05/20/introducing-the-wf4-designer.aspx

What's new in Globalisation in .NET 4 - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/dd890508.aspx

Odyssey WPF Controls - http://odyssey.codeplex.com/

http://dotnet.org.za/rudi/archive/2009/06/07/vs2010-help-for-the-wpfer.aspx - Rudi Grobler

WPF App Framework - http://waf.codeplex.com/

Why no VS 64 bit - http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version.aspx

How to make Layer Validation Diagrams work in the build - http://blogs.infosupport.com/blogs/marcelv/archive/2009/06/09/how-to-make-layer-validation-diagrams-work-in-the-build.aspx

http://teamsystemguides.codeplex.com/

http://blogs.teamsystemnotes.com/2009/06/08/build-automation-and-complexity/

Grassroots Innovation @ Microsoft - http://blogs.msdn.com/jackg/archive/2009/06/10/grassroots-innovation-microsoft.aspx

MVVM webcast - http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032418084&CountryCode=US

F# scripts - http://blogs.msdn.com/chrsmith/archive/2008/09/12/scripting-in-f.aspx and http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2009/06/09/f-useful-for-scripting/

Oslo - part 2

http://blogs.msdn.com/dkaufman/archive/2009/06/05/from-dsls-and-models-to-quadrant-using-oslo-may-ctp-part-ii.aspx

Oslo in action - http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/GLenz/See-Visual-Studio-2010-and-Oslo-in-Action/

http://blogs.msdn.com/jkowalski/archive/2009/06/11/tracing-and-caching-in-entity-framework-available-on-msdn-code-gallery.aspx

EF database first is in 3.5, model first is coming in 4.0, also "code only" is coming for 4.0 beta 1 p://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign/archive/2009/06/10/code-only.aspx

LINQ to SQL compiled queries http://peterkellner.net/2009/06/08/linq2sql-uncompiled-verses-compiled-iis-performance-aspnet/

Caliburn (WPF/SL framework) has gone RC - http://caliburn.codeplex.com/

TFS automated buids video - http://blogs.msdn.com/ukvsts/archive/2009/06/12/automated-build-video.aspx

TFS Rangers say what's cool in VSTS 2010 - http://blogs.msdn.com/willy-peter_schaub/archive/2009/06/11/vsts-rangers-projects-using-vsts-2010-beta-1-as-part-of-the-tfs-migration-tools-initiative.aspx

Visualising Branch Hierarchies - http://blogs.msdn.com/mitrik/archive/2009/06/11/branch-hierarchy-visualization.aspx

Pex - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/documentation.aspx

Automated UI testing - VS 2010 Coded UI Test example - http://blogs.msdn.com/vstsqualitytools/archive/2009/06/12/automated-user-interface-testing-with-coded-ui-test.aspx

Mapping requirements to test plans & test cases in VSTS 2010 - http://blogs.msdn.com/vstsqualitytools/archive/2009/06/04/no-more-missed-requirements.aspx

Memory mapped files in .NET 4 - http://blogs.msdn.com/salvapatuel/archive/2009/06/08/working-with-memory-mapped-files-in-net-4.aspx

Code Contracts Primer -(new in .NET 4) - http://devlicio.us/blogs/derik_whittaker/archive/2009/06/08/code-contracts-primer-part-1-introduction.aspx

BizTalk 2009 - Enterprise Service Bus toolkit - http://blogs.msdn.com/sudhir/archive/2009/06/09/microsoft-releases-biztalk-esb-toolkit-2-0.aspx

MEF primitives - http://blogs.msdn.com/dsplaisted/archive/2009/06/08/a-crash-course-on-the-mef-primitives.aspx

MVVM light toolkit - http://blog.galasoft.ch/archive/2009/06/14/mvvm-lsquolightrsquo-toolkit-for-wpf-and-silverlight.aspx

Interesting links for 2 June 09

2009-06-01T21:46:00.001-07:00

David Hill has posted about a prototype Prism Quick Start Kit - http://blogs.msdn.com/dphill/archive/2009/05/29/prism-quick-start-kit.aspx

What's in and coming for WPF 4 - http://blogs.msdn.com/jaimer/archive/2009/05/27/wpf-4-and-net-framework-4-beta-1-list-of-features-totrack.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/charles_sterling/archive/2009/05/21/running-blend-3-0-with-visual-studio-2010-beta1.aspx

IronPython 2.6 Beta 1 on Codeplex - http://ironpython.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=25126

The 2nd DLR language - IronRuby is up to 0.5 - http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2009/05/ironruby-05-released.html

DLR gets to 0.91 - http://dlr.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=0.91_release_notes

VS2010 walkthroughs - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/dd441784.aspx

What works with VS2010 (Blend/ SL) - http://dlr.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=0.91_release_notes

Great tutorial by Jason Zander

http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/05/22/vs2010-tutorial-build-a-wpf-app-with-beta-1.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/05/26/vs2010-tutorial-testing-tutorial-step-2.aspx

The Lab Management Product – An Overview - http://blogs.msdn.com/amit_chatterjee/archive/2009/05/24/the-lab-management-product-an-overview.aspx

Architectural Inspections: Implemented in Visual Studio Team Architect 2010

Integrated and Isolated Shell for VS 2010 Beta 1

http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2009/05/28/poco-in-the-entity-framework-part-2-complex-types-deferred-loading-and-explicit-loading.aspx

http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2009/02/03/silverlight-wpf-control-browser.aspx - App that let's you see demos of WPF & SL controls

ViewModels and CheckListBoxes

The Role of Sketching in Software Development - http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/05/26/the-role-of-sketching-in-software-development.aspx

http://team.silverlight.net/announcements/sketchflow-rapid-prototyping-that-works/

Blueprints have disappeared - gone into "internal incubation" - http://blogs.msdn.com/mglehman/archive/2009/05/27/update-on-microsoft-blueprints.aspx

DSL Tools - VS2010 Beta 1 - http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/DslTools and http://blogs.msdn.com/jmprieur/archive/2009/05/22/announcing-the-visual-studio-2010-dsl-sdk-beta-1.aspx

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Expert-to-Expert-Martin-Fowler-and-Chris-Sells-Perspectives-on-Domain-Specific-Languages/

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Chris-Sells-History-of-DevCon/

Press site for Bing - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/bing/default.mspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/rweigelt/archive/2009/06/01/7104846.aspx - GhostDoc has been acquired by SubMain, developer of tools like CodeIt.Right. The agreement covers the usage of GhostDoc's documentation generation technology in their products, as well as the availability of GhostDoc as a standalone product. SubMain will continue to maintain and distribute a non-crippled version of GhostDoc free of charge, and will make sure that it will work with future versions of Visual Studio like the upcoming VS2010. The first step is a new version 2.5 of GhostDoc that has been released just moments ago.

VS2010 Code Gallery - some new add-ins for VS2010 - http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/

- RegEx editor, Insert Images in source files, custom intellisense presenter

ActiPro SyntaxEditor for WPF

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/d9984737-275d-4919-b7c8-7a5f5f83c74c

SyntaxEditor is a powerful text editing control that is packed with features for efficient code editing, including syntax highlighting, line numbers, block selection, IntelliPrompt UI, split views, zooming, bi-di support, and much more. It has many of the same code editing features found in the Visual Studio code editor.

SyntaxEditor is built on top of our next-generation extensible text/parsing framework. While over 20 sample languages are available to get you started (such as C#, VB, XML, and more), custom language definitions can be developed and distributed with your applications as well. SyntaxEditor is designed for use in IDE (integrated development environment) applications, however there are many other applications out there than can take advantage of such a control.

Chris Sells says that Oslo May 2009 CTP Available Now

So what this Oslo stuff all about? - From DSLs and Models to “Quadrant” using “Oslo” May CTP – Part I

Too Lazy to do more than cut/paste links from RSS Bandit tabs :-(

2009-04-30T01:29:00.001-07:00

Prism

In this post, Brian Noyes describes what he calls composite extensions. It's based on Prism but is not tied to WPF, and describes a region manager like ability for Wonforms - http://www.softinsight.com/bnoyes/2009/04/22/CompositeExtensionsForPrism2.aspx

http://www.softinsight.com/bnoyes/2009/04/22/BuildingCompositeWPFApplicationsAtEvansvilleNETUsersGroup.aspx

http://elegantcode.com/2009/04/22/code-cast-26-prism-20/

Build Outlook style app - http://blogs.msdn.com/erwinvandervalk/archive/2009/04/29/how-to-build-an-outlook-style-application-with-prism-v2-part-2.aspx

WPF

The future of WPF at Mix09

WPF Coverflow control released

http://blogs.msdn.com/ivo_manolov/archive/2009/04/24/9566644.aspx - WPF test api

http://blogs.msdn.com/ivo_manolov/archive/2009/04/28/9574933.aspx - WPF Application Quality Guide v0.5 Released!

Getting ready for Windows 7

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/04/25/walkthrough-to-get-your-applications-ready-for-windows-7.aspx

http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2009/04/28/what-developers-should-be-doing-in-readiness-for-windows-7.aspx

Other

Mindscape twitter http://twitter.com/MindscapeHQ

Software Factories - someone's doing it - http://vincenth.net/blog/archive/2009/04/24/factory-overview-part-1-a-bird%e2%80%99s-eye-view-of-the-macaw-solutions-factory.aspx

http://azuregrid.codeplex.com/

Learn SL - http://silverzine.com/

http://blogs.msdn.com/paulcornell/archive/2009/04/20/visual-studio-2010-model-first-development.aspx - model in VS210 - create an Entity Data Model

All in one code framework - http://cfx.codeplex.com/

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2009/04/29/let-us-burn-all-those-pesky-util-amp-common-libraries.aspx - Ayende rant

Build a training course - http://coursebuilder.codeplex.com/

BizTalk 2009 released http://blogs.msdn.com/sudhir/archive/2009/04/28/microsoft-releases-biztalk-server-2009.aspx

Poco, Mef, and custom type systems. Are you ready to take the red pill? - more from Glenn Block - http://codebetter.com/blogs/glenn.block/archive/2009/04/27/poco-mef-and-custom-type-systems-are-you-ready-to-take-the-red-pill.aspx

Notes

2009-04-19T22:58:00.001-07:00

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/

http://blogs.msdn.com/agile/archive/2009/04/16/enterprise-library-5-0-product-backlog-prioritization-results.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/agile/archive/2009/04/20/enterprise-library-5-0-and-we-re-off.aspx

http://wpfonyx.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Introduction

http://sachabarber.net/?p=499

http://sachabarber.net/?p=504

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/PrismLayoutManager.aspx

http://exceldatareader.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=26041

http://jmorrill.hjtcentral.com/Home/tabid/428/EntryId/403/Glass-Behavior-for-WPF.aspx

http://shapingsoftware.com/2009/04/13/performance-hot-spots/

http://blogs.msdn.com/vinsibal/archive/2009/04/10/launching-a-custom-dialog-to-edit-items-in-a-datagrid-with-mvvm.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/nikolait/archive/2009/04/10/pex-0-10-released-icse-tutorial-on-parameterized-unit-testing.aspx

http://groovy.codeplex.com/

http://www.milkcarton.com/blog/2009/04/04/5+Minute+Tutorial+On+Managed+Extensibility+Framework+MEF.aspx

http://dbxamlword.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=25872

http://elegantcode.com/2009/04/08/analyze-performance-issues-in-your-wpf-application-with-wpfperf/

http://marlongrech.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/mvvm-mediator-acb-cool-wpf-app-the-mvvm/

http://blogs.msdn.com/saveenr/archive/2009/04/20/visio-transparencies-and-soft-shadows.aspx

Notes

2009-04-08T01:50:00.001-07:00

http://managedesent.codeplex.com/

http://witsynchronizer.codeplex.com/

http://weblogs.asp.net/whaggard/archive/2009/04/07/mef-preview-5-released.aspx

http://joshsmithonwpf.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/a-mediator-prototype-for-wpf-apps/

http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/archive/2009/04/06/9534426.aspx

http://www.mindscape.co.nz/blog/index.php/2009/04/05/intro-to-wpf-flow-diagrams/

http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/04/04/expression-blend-3-preview.aspx

http://blog.vuscode.com/malovicn/archive/2009/04/04/microsoft-unity-auto-mocking-container.aspx

http://team.interknowlogy.com/blogs/ryanabreu/archive/2009/04/03/mix09-brain-dump-part-2-prototyping-and-designing-with-expression-blend-3.aspx

Just before Easter Holiday

2009-04-08T01:30:00.001-07:00

MIX highlights

Jaime Rodriguez has 3 nice articles about the highlights of MIX09

his favourite bits
what about WPF - with SL out of the browser, is WPF dead ? Answer of course in NO
the "Microsoft Client Continuum" - and how SL, WPF, surface, mobile, etc all deliver across this continuum

Tim Heuer explains what Silverlight OOB is all about.

There are video of preso on WPF 4 - downloading now, and a short summary here

Christan Schormann summarises Blend 3 and Sketchflow.

Rob Relyea gives an update on what we'll see for XAML in .NET 4

UX

Balsamiq Mockups has been mentioned to me as an effective wireframing tool. I'm also very interested in the SketchFlow features of Expression Blend 3. The attraction for me is that you start in low fidelity XAML and incrementally refine as you iterate the UI design to completion. Or at least that has been our experience. So having to refer back to outdated Powerpoint wireframes was not the way to go.

Interesting rant from UX guy moving on from Google, because he doesn't think that they treat UX seriously enough for him.

General

The prolific Jeremy Miller has an article in MSDN mag on Persistence Patterns.

Info on the Windows 7 logo program has been posted.

A new site on CodePlex for the DLR

Virtual Earth WPF control,and Avalon Controls Library

It's Tuesday

2009-03-16T17:47:00.001-07:00

WPF

Josh Smith has a new CodePlex project called Thriple - a library of 3D WPF components.

Rudi Grobler describes Karl's XAML Power Toys - Extract Properties to Style feature. He also points to a cool sample app called PhotoSuru.

Jaime Rodriguez shares his list of WPF blogs.

Sacha Barber describes what he calls the MVVM Mediator pattern.

Charles Perzold has an article in MSDN magazine about writing more efficient ItemsControls.

And our own Tarang Waghela writes about Implementing M-V-VM pattern in WPF.

UX

New article in MSDN magazine on Strategies For Designing Application Navigation

Cory Schuman has a generic XAML loading control

Dax Pandhi has a free WPF theme

Other

Solution Factory is a Visual Studio Addin that exports a solution as a Visual Studio multi-project template

Brian Harry has "lots of news" about VSTS2010/.NET4.0.

Brad Abrams shows off what's coming in Sliverlight 3 for Business Applications.

Project almost finished

2009-03-04T00:37:00.001-08:00

Our current project is almost finished, so I've at last had a chance to browse my blog feeds.

Here's the list of interesting items that attracted my attention over the last few weeks.

WPF

Tim Sneath Announcing Family.Show v3 – Our WPF Reference Application - http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/02/23/announcing-family-show-v3-our-wpf-reference-application.aspx

The guys from Mindscape have announced WPF Flow Diagrams 1.0 released

Josh Smith has an article Using ContentControl3D and Panel3D in a ListBox

MVVM videos

Josh Smith Two Model-View-ViewModel Screencasts

Learn Prism - from Blaine Wastell - http://blogs.msdn.com/blaine/archive/2009/02/28/learn-prism.aspx

How to build an outlook style application using Prism - http://blogs.msdn.com/erwinvandervalk/archive/2009/03/02/how-to-build-an-outlook-style-application.aspx

UX stuff

Shane Morris has pointed to New Video Series- UI Design for Developers Series, by Total Training

Mark Miller has as series of posts on Great UI. Here is the first one I came across - Clarity and Color on the Presentation Layer - http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/markmiller/archive/2009/02/26/great-ui-clarity-and-color-on-the-presentation-layer.aspx

Tip: Invoking Blend from Visual Studio - http://blogs.msdn.com/wpfsdk/archive/2009/02/26/tip-invoking-blend-from-visual-studio.aspx

Bling- easy animation and interaction in C# and WPF

Other

Event Aggregation with MEF (with and without EventAggregator)

http://blogs.msdn.com/gblock/archive/2009/02/23/event-aggregation-with-mef-with-and-without-eventaggregator.aspx

Rob Relyea - what's coming in .NET 4 for XAML - XAML State of the Union – Feb 2009 - http://blogs.windowsclient.net/rob_relyea/archive/2009/02/26/xaml-state-of-the-union-feb-2009.aspx

Somasegar announces DevLabs: Code Contracts for .NET http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/02/23/devlabs-code-contracts-for-net.aspx

Talking Points: ADO.NET Entity Framework http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/archive/2009/02/23/talking-points-ado-net-entity-framework.aspx

NaturalSpec is based on NUnit and completely written in F# - http://code.google.com/p/natural/

NCalc - Mathematical Expressions Evaluator for .NET

Rockford Lhotka has a summary article on Parallel and Concurrency Futures for Microsoft Developers - http://www.devx.com/SpecialReports/Article/40965/1954?pf=true

Friday notes

2009-02-19T23:39:00.001-08:00

http://www.codeplex.com/wpfthemes

http://www.codeplex.com/NodeXL

http://www.codeplex.com/CompositeWPF

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/UndoRedoPart1.aspx

http://www.codeplex.com/StyleFix

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles_Sterling/UI-Automation-Testing-with-Visual-Studio-2010/

http://davybrion.com/blog/2009/02/performance-rules-of-thumb/

http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/gabrielschenker/archive/2009/02/13/the-open-closed-principle.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/dmckinstry/archive/2009/02/15/outlook-add-in-for-tfs-work-item-alerts.aspx

http://www.codeplex.com/wpfpropertygrid

http://sachabarber.net/?p=442

Notes

2009-02-15T04:25:00.001-08:00

General

LightSpeed 2.2 released

Make Your Application Extendable Using the DLR

http://codebetter.com/blogs/glenn.block/archive/2009/01/28/managed-extensibility-framework-preview-4-a-grab-bag-of-goodies.aspx

http://www.notionsolutions.com/Products/Pages/NotionTimesheet.aspx

Building lightweight dashboards using Excel

UX

UX Patterns Explorer - really neat patterns site from Infragistics

Implementation Patterns of User-Centered Design, Development and Agile

‘Art and Science of UX’ Deepzoom Resurrected

A comprehensive list to Silverlight Controls for developers

Notes

2009-01-07T23:11:00.001-08:00

http://www.codeplex.com/ManagedEsent

ESENT Managed Interop
ESENT is an embeddable database storage engine (ISAM) which is part of Windows. It provides reliable, transacted, concurrent, high-performance data storage with row-level locking, write-ahead logging and snapshot isolation. This is a managed wrapper for the ESENT Win32 API.

http://blogs.msdn.com/windowssdk/archive/2008/10/23/esent-extensible-storage-engine-api-in-the-windows-sdk.aspx

ESENT (Extensible Storage Engine) API in the Windows SDK

I’m not sure how many people know that Windows comes with an embeddable, transactional database engine which is available to developers through the Windows SDK. The ESENT database engine can be used whenever an application wants high-performance, low-overhead storage of structured or semi-structured data. This can range from something as simple as a hash table which is too large to store in memory to a complex application with many tables, columns and indexes. ESENT is used by the Active Directory, Windows Desktop Search, Windows Mail and several other Windows services and a slightly modified version of the code is used by Microsoft Exchange to store all its mailbox data. The ESENT API is available through the SDK and can be used on all versions of Windows from Windows Server 2000 on up.

The significant technical features of ESENT include:

· ACID transactions with savepoints, lazy commits and robust crash recovery.

· Snapshot isolation.

· Record-level locking — multi-versioning provides non-blocking reads.

· Highly concurrent database access.

· Flexible meta-data (tens of thousands of columns, tables and indexes are possible).

· Indexing support for integer, floating point, ASCII, Unicode and binary columns.

· Sophisticated index types including conditional, tuple and multi-valued.

· Individual columns can be up to 2GB in size. A database can be up to 16TB in size.

· Can be configured for high performance or low resource usage.

· No administration required (even the database cache size can adjust itself automatically).

· No download. Your application uses the esent.dll which comes with the operating system.

Caveats: ESENT should only be used for applications which have simple, predefined queries; applications that want to do ad-hoc queries should investigate a storage solution that provides a query layer. The database file cannot be shared between multiple processes simultaneously.

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2008/12/23/f-to-ship-with-visual-studio-2010.aspx

F# To Ship with Visual Studio 2010

Don Syme has announced that F# would ship as part of Visual Studio 2010 in his blog entry, F# to ship as part of Visual Studio 2010. F# combines the succinct, expressive, and compositional style of functional programming with the runtime, libraries, interoperability, and object model of .NET.

F# gives you:

Succinct, type-inferred functional programming
Interactive scripting like Python and other languages
the foundations for an interactive data visualization environment
the combination of type inference and safety, like that of ML
a cross-compiling core shared with the popular OCaml language
a performance profile like that of C#
easy access to the entire range of powerful .NET libraries and database tools
a foundational simplicity with similar roots to Scheme
the option of a top-rate Visual Studio integration
the experience of a first-class team of language researchers with a track record of delivering high-quality implementations
the speed of native code execution on the concurrent, portable, and distributed .NET Framework

The development in the first Visual Studio 2010 community technology preview focused on F# for exploratory programming with F# Interactive, programming with data and implementing parallel and asynchronous components.

S. Somasegar who leads Developer Division at Microsoft had announced a year ago that F# was to become one of Microsoft’s supported languages on the .NET platform. He wrote, "Language features such as lambda expressions in C# and generics in .NET 2.0 have roots in functional languages, and LINQ is directly based on functional programming techniques. Through LINQ and Parallel FX, ideas from functional languages are helping us address some of the biggest challenges facing the industry today, from the impedance mismatch between data and objects to the challenges of the multi-core and parallel computing space."

Luca Bolognese has released a .NET library that provides the full set of financial functions from Excel. You can download the library from Excel Financial functions for .NET.

SFS for Microsoft Visual Studio

Code generator, Entity Framework to any Layer using Text Transformation Templates in Microsot Visual Studio, and other tools for .edmx diagram.

The Visual Studio 10 CTP VPC expired! What should I do?

A couple of months ago, we unveiled Visual Studio 10 at several conferences and provided attendees a copy of a VPC with Visual Studio 10. We also made the CTP available here.

Thanks to a lot of partners, customers, and hobbyists, we got a ton of great feedback on our bits and look forward to hearing more from the community. Unfortunately, the CTP came with a timebomb and expired at the end of 2008. We have not shipped another CTP since then so if you still want to play with the CTP VPC but have run into the expiration problem, follow the steps in Jeff Beehler's blog to disable the synchronization between your VPC and the host machine, then turn back the clock :)

Free Entity Framework eBook

Zeeshan Hirani has written a 500 pages book about the Entity Framework and has released it as a free eBook. Wow!

http://weblogs.asp.net/zeeshanhirani/archive/2008/12/18/my-christmas-present-to-the-entity-framework-community.aspx#comments

Last list before Christmas

2008-12-22T22:35:00.001-08:00

New version of Deep Zoom composer. On the list to try out next year.

The VSTS Rangers have released version 2.0 of their TFS 2008 Branching Guide.

The November CTP of Microsoft Blueprints is out on Codeplex. Yet another one to check out next year. "Microsoft Blueprints deliver where other forms of guidance fall short, making you more productive by helping you codify conventions, automate tasks, ramp up quickly on new technologies and requirements, and package successful designs and implementations, so that you can use them again. They can also reduce your time to market, sharpen your estimates, and improve your code quality.
A Blueprint is an accelerator for a specific type of software deliverable like a web service, a rich client, or a mobile application. A Blueprint is a package of process guidance, human-readable resources (docs, decks, videos, etc.) and machine-readable resources (code snippets, templates, frameworks, DSL tools, etc.) which help you build or manage a specific task or domain. It’s an SDK for a problem, not a product or specific technology. "

For those who prefer guidance in book form, check out Documentation for Composite Application Guidance for WPF–June 2008 (Prism).

And yet more book style guidance has been released by the P&P guys - Application Architecture Guide 2.0.

And more updates to the WPF Application Quality Guide.

The WPF group have a new test tool on Codeplex - TestApi - a library of Test APIs.

And here's a tip about debugging WPF data binding.

Interesting Silverlight stuff

2008-12-15T23:13:00.001-08:00

Some interesting blogs I've seen recently are pointing to a convergence between Silverlight and WPF.

Bart Czernicki has some predictions about what we'll see in Silverlight 3. The support for 3D and hardware acceleration sounds interesting.

Want Silverlight on a Desktop? Check out project Fiji.

Build for multi-cores now!

2008-11-13T04:18:00.001-08:00

I guess we've all heard of the "free performance lunch". For many years we have enjoyed a "free" performance improvement for our apps in line with CPU performance gains. Buy a newer machine and your apps run faster. Basically we're getting more cycles which makes our slow apps faster over time. Whilst Moore's Law predicts exponential growth, this relates to transistor densities, and we've seen a spectacular growth in data storage, but the rise in clock speeds has slowed, and the growth is now to multi-cores. The free lunch is over.

In line with this trend, Windows 7 can scale to 256 processors.

But even though the free lunch is over, the Redmond Steakhouse will be open for free dinners if you build software for multi-cores now. (The gag continues, Winston)

The Moth has some wise words of advice to start now. I really recommend his recent articles on Fine Grained Parallelism and Do NOT Explicitly Use Threads for Parallel Programming.

He says "Our goal with parallel programming is to write once and have our code scale well as the hardware underneath it gets better, i.e. see incremental benefits when running our app on machines with more cores without changing the code." Chunking your app into fine grain partitions which can be threaded provides part of the answer, but "we need some kind of user mode "engine" to schedule only as many threads as the number of cores on the machine and we need this to take place automatically for us. We also need to be able to partition the overall compute-bound operation into many work items that will get executed by the "engine"." That engine is there now, but improvements are coming in .NET 4.

Daniel's blog also has articles on Threading vs Parallelism and the Parallel extensions in .NET 4 (which are also available in CTP for .NET 3.5 now).

Also worth keeping an eye on is the Microsoft Parallel Programming team blog.

Technorati Tags: multi-core, paralell Programming

Software Factories resurface as "Blueprints"

2008-11-10T23:56:00.001-08:00

Back on 25th October, I said.......

Steve Cook is co-author of seminal book on Software Factories : : Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools, together with Jack Greenfield, Keith Short & Stuart Kent. After a drought of over 2 years, Keith Short has surfaced to tell us he's been working on Oslo, so I wonder if Jack has also? Has the software factory initiative morphed into Oslo?

Well, not quite.........

Just notes for now

http://infosysblogs.com/microsoft/2008/11/microsoft_blueprint_walkthroug.html

http://infosysblogs.com/microsoft/2008/11/microsoft_blueprints_building.html

http://msdn.microsoft.com/hi-in/architecture/blueprints(en-us).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/hi-in/architecture/dd179252(en-us).aspx

http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/softwareplusservicesblueprints/

http://www.codeplex.com/blueprints

http://msdn.microsoft.com/hi-in/architecture/dd179251(en-us).aspx

A one day lab on the DSL Tools has been posted.

http://wildermuth.com/2008/11/08/Why_Domain_Specific_Languages_are_Important_to_Everyday_Developers

http://wildermuth.com/

Andre Furtado - PhD Candidate (UFPE), Software Engineer (Microsoft Corporation) has a Codeplex project - Feature Model DSL. This is based on the Feature Model DSL in the Practical Software Factories in .NET by Gunther Lenz and Christoph Wienands. Haven't run it yet, 'cos the installer said I needed VB :-(

New stuff - 11 November

2008-11-10T23:45:00.001-08:00

StyleCop violations as you type

There's a new release of StyleCop for ReSharper. Howard van Rooijen has been joined by some other devs. This means that you get hit with StyleCop violations as you type.

VS2010 goes WPF

Brad Abrams has a short video of Scott Guthrie's PDC keynote about some of the things coming in VS2010. In the video Scott reveals that VS2010 will use WPF and also use MEF(managed extensibility framework) to extend it. So that's a great validation for us about WPF which we're using, and MEF which we'll probably adopt. The video's only 6 minutes and is really worth it.

Hammett (founder of Castle Windsor - now working on MEF) talks about the proposed lifetime support for MEF.

Other new stuff

Drop 5 of Prism v 2 is out.

Distributed Development

2008-11-10T02:07:00.001-08:00

I recently blogged about some new paper guidance from the Patterns & Practices team about distributed development. The article about Distributed Agile Development is essential reading for any distributed development shop.

A useful companion to this article is work being done by David Tuffley at Griffith University. I saw David present at an ACS meeting on work he is doing on Leadership of Integrated Virtual Teams. As the title implies it particularly looks at the expanded leadership characteristics that are essential to get the most out of virtual / distributed teams.

Both articles recognise that whilst co-located teams are preferable, in today's world this is not always possible. So recognising this reality, they provide practical suggestions and a framework to lift our game in this area.

PDC without the cost & jet lag

2008-11-01T20:28:00.001-07:00

You can watch videos of the PDC sessions on channel9.msdn

These are the ones that are on my viewing list:

Day Two #2 - Chris Anderson and Don Box - Keynote
Day Two #1 - Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and David Treadwell - Keynote
Day One - Ray Ozzie, Amitabh Srivastava, Bob Muglia and David Thompson - opening keynote
Oslo - The Language - Don Box
A Lap around Oslo - Douglas Purdy
Oslo - Customizing and Extending the Visual Design Experience - Don Box
Windows 7- Design Principles for Windows 7 - Samuel Moreau
A Lap Around Windows Azure - Manuvir Das
Team Foundation Server 2010: Cool New Features - Brian Harry
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System- A Lap Around VSTS 2010 - Cameron Skinner
Managed Extensibility Framework- Overview - Glenn Block
Microsoft Sync Framework Advances - Lev Novik
Parallel Programming for Managed Developers with the Next Version of Microsoft Visual Studio - Daniel Moth
Microsoft Visual Studio- Bringing out the Best in Multicore Systems - Hazim Shafi
Entity Framework Futures - Tim Mallalieu
WF 4.0- A First Look - Kenny Wolf
WF 4.0- Extending with Custom Activities - Matt Winkler
The Future of C# - Anders Hejlsberg
Deep Dive- Dynamic Languages in Microsoft .NET - Jim Hugunin
Framework Design Guidelines - Krzysztof Cwalina & Brad Abrams
Microsoft Expression Blend- Tips & Tricks - Douglas Olson
WPF Roadmap - Kevin Gjerstad
Silverlight Controls Roadmap - Shawn Burke
Microsoft Silverlight, WPF and the Microsoft .NET Framework- Sharing Skills and Code - Ian Ellison-Taylor
Microsoft .NET Framework- Declarative Programming Using XAML -

I wonder how long I'll take to get through more than a 24 hour day's worth of riveting presos, especially as I haven't finished the first one yet?

PDC announcements....

2008-10-30T20:46:00.001-07:00

LINQ to SQL being killed off ?

As per Tim Mallalieu's blog, We’re making significant investments in the Entity Framework such that as of .NET 4.0 the Entity Framework will be our recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios. We are listening to customers regarding LINQ to SQL and will continue to evolve the product based on feedback we receive from the community as well.

That seemed to be the message we've been decoding for a while, so lucky we didn't go down that route.

PDC Summaries

Ayende gives his first impressions of using the CTP - Ayende on VS2010

Martin Fowler gives his impressions of Oslo based on a sneek preview prior to the release at PDC

Sam Gentile's points to his trusted folks summary for PDC day 2

Silverlight & WPF seem to be coming together according Andres Aguiar's report

The Velocity team have announced Velocity CTP 2. Microsoft project code named "Velocity" provides a highly scalable in-memory application cache for all kinds of data.

Silverlight has Visual State Manager, but it's not yet in WPF. However the Expression Blend team tell us how to expose it - Blend 2 SP1 + WPF Toolkit = Visual State Manager for WPF - see previous blog entry.

P&P Guidance

J. D. Meier's Patterns & Practices team has been busy with releases of paper guidance

and this comes on top of the App Arch Guide book that I blogged about earlier in the week. I've started reading it, and it's definitely recommended reading material. We'll be following and using it.

New Versions of Unity, EntLib, WPF data grid

2008-10-29T14:26:00.001-07:00

With all of the futuristic announcements at PDC, it's easy to miss some significant (for us) dot point releases of tooling we're using.

Enterprise Library 4.1 - seems to be mainly about Unity 1.2
Unity 1.2 - what's new http://www.codeplex.com/unity/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=18855
WPF DataGrid v 1 - this is part of the "WPF Toolkit" and also includes v 1 of DatePicker/Calendar and a preview of VisualStateManager(VSM). VSM is already in Silverlight. Scott Guthrie describes VSM for SL in his blog.

Fire Hose Drinking Time

2008-10-28T15:34:00.001-07:00

Well it's PDC time and time to have truck loads of emerging technologies thrown at us.

Shannon, Nick & John will be able to give us the view direct from LA, but so far some of the blogger geeks have kept me up to date.

The announcements that have caught my attention so far (and some of them we knew were coming, so they're not entirely new) are:

Azure - "Build new applications in the cloud - or use interoperable services that run on Microsoft infrastructure to extend and enhance your existing applications". Ok, we've heard all about cloud computing for quite a while, and this looks like a down payment on the promise. The CTP is up now.
The next Rosario CTP - Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 - is up. It's still just a VPC image, but we'll get this up and running soon. The marketing dudes have had a field day with the hype - enough to make you puke : "Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 mark the next generation of developer tools from Microsoft. Designed to address the latest needs of developers, Visual Studio delivers key innovations in the following pillars:
Democratizing Application Lifecycle Management
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) crosses many roles within an organization and traditionally not every one of the roles has been an equal player in the process. Visual Studio Team System 2010 continues to build the platform for functional equality and shared commitment across an organization’s ALM process.
Enabling emerging trends
Every year the industry develops new technologies and new trends. With Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, Microsoft delivers tooling and framework support for the latest innovations in application architecture, development and deployment.
Inspiring developer delight
Ever since the first release of Visual Studio, Microsoft has set the bar for developer productivity and flexibility. Visual Studio 2010 continues to deliver on the core developer experience by significantly improving upon it for roles involved with the software development process. .NET Framework 4.0 contains numerous improvements that make it easier to develop powerful and compelling applications.
Riding the next generation platform wave
Microsoft continues to invest in the market leading operating system, productivity application and server platforms to deliver increased customer value in these offerings. With Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 customers will have the tooling support and the platform support needed to create amazing solutions around these technologies.
Windows 7 - our guys will get an alpha edition Tuesday
Office 14
C# 4.0 and beyond
Oslo - more marketing hype : “Oslo” is the code name for our platform for model-driven applications. The goal of “Oslo” is to provide a 10x productivity gain by making model-driven applications mainstream with domain-specific models, a new language and tools. It's all there on MSDN at the

Oslo Developer Center

I'm following jb's blog for some early highlights - and he's got articles about most the above. He's from Mindscape who are giving us awesome service for their WPF property grid (thanks Ivan).

App Arch Guide

J. D. Meirs and the patterns and practices team have release ver 2.0 of the P&P Application Architecture Guide book. I've downloaded it, and it's on the reading list.

Prism, WPF and Scrum

2008-10-26T15:10:00.001-07:00

There's a community contribution project on Codelplex for Prism (Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight). New stuff includes a WindowRegionAdapter, bootstrapper extensions, and the use of Castle Windsor instead of Unity.

We're on the lookout for a docking control for WPF. Here's what I've found so far:-

Haven't checked them out as yet - but looks like we'll have plenty to choose from.

An oldie but a goodie - I came across an intro to Scrum by Ken Schwaber - worth a read. I'm also off this Wednesday 29th Oct to the first meeting of the Brisbane Agile/Scrum User Group.

25th Oct weekly trawl

2008-10-24T22:52:00.001-07:00

Vista, Windows 7, .NET 4

Winston tells us to expect Vista SP2 - http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheSmartClientFactory/~3/430907304/windows-vista-service-pack-2.html

And more speculation about release dates for Windows 7 around end 2009 - http://www.istartedsomething.com/20081022/windows-7-targets-october-2009-rtm-retail-soon-after/

Dave Bost shows off the new logo for .NET - http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DaveBost/~3/431374104/

WPF related

Prism v2 drop 4 is out and has a focus on composition - http://blogs.msdn.com/erwinvandervalk/archive/2008/10/24/prism-v2-drop-4.aspx

Rockford Lhotka is sold on SL / WPF. Sure there's a learning curve, but once you're there, it's no turning back - http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/IsSilverlightReadyForBusinessApps.aspx

Karl Shifflett puts forward ideas for building WPF LOB forms. He wants a solution that:

enables RAD GUI layout and maintenance of LOB forms

is toolable

leverages the intrinsic power of WPF & Silverlight

can be styled

lays itself out

responds well to localization

Sounds like just what we're after :-) - http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/wpf-silverlight-lob-form-layout-searching-for-a-better-solution/

James Kovacs has posted a slide deck on composite apps and Prism in particular - http://codebetter.com/blogs/james.kovacs/archive/2008/10/21/principles-patterns-and-prism-presentation.aspx

John Stockton is also pondering on the designer / developer interaction for Silverlight / WPF projects - just like we are - http://riathoughts.com/blog/designer-developer-workflow/

Glenn Block provides good insight with http://codebetter.com/blogs/glenn.block/archive/2008/10/19/finding-the-right-level-of-coupling.aspx, and also reports on bringing Prism to Winforms - http://blogs.msdn.com/gblock/archive/2008/10/20/bringing-prism-to-winforms.aspx - not that we'd go that way.

Josh Smith has released Crack.NET, a tool which allows you to inspect and manipulate the managed objects in the memory of another process. Also it allows you to write scripts in IronPython and have them run in Crack.NET allowing you to do all kinds of manipulations - http://joshsmithonwpf.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/introducing-cracknet/ and http://joshsmithonwpf.wordpress.com/cracknet/

The source code for much of WPF, as in .NET 3.5 Sp1 has been made available at -http://blogs.msdn.com/rscc/archive/2008/10/22/wpf-sources-for-net-framework-3-5-sp1-are-available.aspx

Shane Morris tells of a SilverLight designer & developer network just set up (in Melb) - http://blogs.msdn.com/shanemo/archive/2008/10/20/silverlight-designer-and-developer-network-launches-in-melbourne.aspx

Other

Iron Python 2.0 RC1 is out - http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=17404

Soma announces DevLabs - an initiative to showcase innovative new stuff - http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2008/10/23/inspiring-through-innovation-devlabs.aspx

One of the first projects is Pex - automated white box testing for .NET. It will be in .VS2010 (Rosario), see http://blogs.msdn.com/nikolait/archive/2008/10/24/pex-now-a-devlabs-project.aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/nikolait/archive/2008/10/22/pex-0-8-released-featuring-code-digger-and-stubs.aspx

Following on from Scott Hanselman's T4 list of resources - here's another one - http://blog.magenic.com/blogs/jons/archive/2008/10/23/How-to-Pass-Parameters-to-the-T4-Code-Generator_3A00_-Stuff-Found-on-the-Web.aspx

Some neat TFS tools are at http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/archive/2008/10/22/tools-for-tfs-on-codeplex-teamreview-and-info-kiosk.aspx

Gareth Jones of the DSL team points to some new screencasts - http://blogs.msdn.com/garethj/archive/2008/10/21/new-dsl-screencasts-avaialble-from-vsx-conference.aspx

Steve Cook points to some new videos on Visual Studio 10 architecture features http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecook/archive/2008/10/21/architecture-edition-videos.aspx. Now I wonder what the marketing people are going to do with this - not much value if it just gets squireled away in an "Architecture Edition"

Steve Cook is co-author of seminal book on Software Factories : : Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools, together with Jack Greenfield, Keith Short & Stuart Kent. After a drought of over 2 years, Keith Short has surfaced to tell us he's been working on Oslo, so I wonder if Jack has also? Has the software factory initiative morphed into Oslo?

And because we'll be using some LINQ stuff on one of our current projects, here's some links to some useful tools. They're not exactly new, but I think we'll find them of use - a visual LINQ query builder - http://blogs.msdn.com/mitsu/archive/2008/04/02/visual-linq-query-builder-for-linq-to-sql-vlinq.aspx and LinqPad - http://www.linqpad.net/

20 Oct 08 - Interesting Stuff

2008-10-19T20:45:00.001-07:00

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

Back after a holiday

2008-10-09T01:28:00.001-07:00

Had a great holiday in Melbourne and Tasmania recently, so missed out the weekly blog entry :-(

Ayende Rahien is a prolific blogger, usually worth a read, and he's been writing a book on Domain Specific Languages - specifically for Boo, yet another .NET language. He's using the Manning "Early Access Program", which means you can buy the electronic copy and read it as it's being written. I've read the first (free) chapter, which gives a very good overview of DSLs.

Lots of content about parallel programming in the latest MSDN magazine.

The Patterns & Practices people continue to add to the "App Arch Guide 2.0 Knowledge Base". To quote : The App Arch guide provides design-level guidance for the architecture and design of applications built on the .NET Framework. It focuses on the most common types of applications, partitioning application functionality into layers, components, and services, and walks through their key design characteristics.This guide is a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, product teams, and industry experts. Certainly worth a look for "How Tos" such as

How To - Structure Your Application

How To - Design Presentation Layer

How To - Design Business Entities

How To - Design Business Components

How To - Design Business Workflow Components

The MSBuild Extension Pack codeplex project provides some useful additions.

Glenn Block announced a Codeplex project "to leverage IoC containers / service location mechanisms without taking hard dependencies", and he has a nice article on what is MEF - Managed Extensibility Framework.

We have also been pondering over when to use Unity versus MEF versus MAF (System.AddIn). Our conclusion is that we use Unity as our IoC / DI container, we consider MEF as a solution for extensibility, and where we need security / isolation then we look to MAF or VSTA. Glenn explains this on a Codeplex thread.

The "Morning Brew" from Chris Alcock is a really good distillation of news which should be on your blog roll - it's where much of my content comes from.

Paul Stovell, who's been working with us, has a new article Architecture: Five tips for Low Friction Projects, some of which are somewhat controversial.

Back in June, I blogged about PostSharp - AOP for .NET. Ayende has had a look and was very impressed.

The Future of Expression Blend

2008-09-16T04:15:00.001-07:00

Don Burnett changed his blog address a while back and I missed it so have not seen his insightful UX blogs on my aggregator for a while. He's written a good entry which includes a link to how you can get Intellisense for Blend 2.5. Sounds like I should check it out.

Wireframe style

2008-09-16T03:47:00.001-07:00

Interaction Designers / UX people usually start out with low fidelity wireframe mockups for preliminary UI designs, often in a tool like Powerpoint They are done in black & white so that the commenting audience can see that they are not finished, and you are more likely to get them to constructively comment. A corollary of this is that it's time to stop collecting feedback when it gets down to discussing colours.

We're working with WPF, sometimes we use the Visual Studio designer and sometimes we use Blend. So in discussion with our UX guy today, we came up with the idea of a "wireframe" theme for WPF that we can apply to get feedback on the first iterations of the XAML storyboard. We'll be trying this out.

Weekly trawl

2008-09-15T19:14:00.001-07:00

The new version of NDepend comes with interactive code dependencies graph. Looks interesting.....

Jaroslaw Kowalski has written an adapter to allow the use of POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) with Entity Framework.

Keith Elder has some useful thoughts on Building the “Good Enough” Framework.

Howard van Rooijen blogged some time back about integrating StyleCop with ReSharper. "StyleCop for ReSharper" is a ReSharper 4.1 plugin that allows Microsoft StyleCop to be run as you type, generating real-time syntax highlighting of violations. He's now published the plugin on Codeplex.

I've been looking around for a tool that converts Word docs to XAML, and whilst I found some rather convoluted solutions, it was nice to Michael Scherotter post a Word 2007 Add-in solution on Codeplex. For WPF the document is converted into a FlowDocument element. An easy way to include rich documentation in your WPF (and SL) apps. I've tried it out and it's pretty cool!

Because we're got a focus on UX right now, I was interested to see the Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) published on Codeplex. It provides Design Guidance and Toolkit controls in Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET & WinForms. Whilst it's specific to health, there should be a number of the guidelines that are transferable.

Jimmy Bogard has written some IoC container guidelines. He's based them around StructureMap, but it was good to see that we are applying some of the guidelines with our Unity work.

The week gone by - 14 Sept 2008

2008-09-14T04:58:00.001-07:00

Shane Morris, Microsoft UX evangelist for Australia paid us a visit on Fri 12th to give inspire us about the importance of user experience and what it means to Microsoft and to partners like use. Shane's blog is worth subscribing to. We've also had Matt Morphett who Shane holds in very high regard, working with us on some interaction design.

I've been looking more closely at the DLR - Dynamic Language Runtime, especially after I talked with Harry Pierson at TechEd. Harry looks after Iron Python, and V2.0 will run on the DLR. It seems to hold great promise in the "scripting" environment.

Jimmy Schementi has updated the Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK with the newest DLR, IronRuby, IronPython, and JScript binaries and sources. I've also read that a dynamic version of VB is also slated to run on the DLR, but it's been pretty quiet since the MIX07 announcement, so maybe we'll hear something more at PDC.

Also of interest is DLR Pad, which creates an interactive programming environment for IronPython and WPF. It's on Codeplex.

Poking around in the IronPython space, I came across Resolver which is an interesting Excel-like / Python fusion - written mainly in IronPython. Harry Pierson mentioned it as a solid reference implementation for IronPython.

The main community site for IronPython is here. Also Michael Foord & Christain Muirhead are writing a book - IronPython in Action - which I've started to read. One thing that I did learn was that it got its name from the famous BBC show- nudge, nudge:-). There's also heaps of material on the official Python site.

When looking at Resolver, I came across a Code Project by Sebastien Lorion - A Fast CSV Reader, which could be useful.

TechEd Sydney 2008

2008-09-07T15:40:00.001-07:00

Shane Morris, Microsoft's UX evangelist in Australia gave a couple of great presos. He used deep zoom in his UX session and showcased the Expression suite in another.

Local Brisbane boys Anthony Borton & William Bartholemew demo'd the architect features of Rosario, and the word is that the next CTP will coincide with PDC at the end of October. Particularly neat are the architectural discovery and validation features. We can also expect some new features as well. Hopefully the architect features will be available to all developers.

Harry Pierson's session on moving beyond the industrial age into what he terms the "individual age" was thought provoking. His main tenet was that today's institutions and the was we do IT is still rooted around a factory mentality, and that we will change. Harry in his new role with the Iron Python team extolled the virtues of open source dynamic languages. Expect Iron Python 2 integrated into Visual Studio just after PDC, an alpha version of Iron Python built on the DLR around the same time, as well as an Iron Ruby beta.

Paul Stovell (who's doing work for us) talked on Reactive Programming - which he describes as "data binding gone mad". He also demo'd his own Bindable LINQ.

Elvin Slavik gave an overview of SQL Server 2008 spatial features. The new geometry and geography types provide a complete storage mechanism for spatial data (x,y,z & m) but the spatial functions are only 2D for now.

Another Queenslander, Joel Pobar gave a great overview of F#. He gave 3 compelling reasons for functional languages. In a data driven world, we need higher order algorithms and techniques to derive value. In a world where scalability is king, we need tools, frameworks and languages that scale. To take advantage of the multi-core (r)evolution we need more adaptive languages and compilers.

Kiwi Chris Auld outlined what's coming in Oslo. It's being run by the Connected Systems Division which also looks after BizTalk, WCF and WF. Expect Oslo in around 12-18 months time over 3 waves. First up we'll see a new version of workflow foundation in .NET 4 and Rosario VSTS . The new WF will have a better designer and improved UX and will include a new "flowchart" workflow type. At present we have sequential which is simple, but not too useful as it doesn't support "go back" operations. The state machine workflow allows you to do anything, but is more complex to implement. The new flowchart workflow is designed to fit between these extremes. It will still be aimed as devs rather than end users. The second wave will include the repository, visual editor and a process server(WF/WCF only), with the third wave including the full process server(lifecycle manager and BizTalk host). To summarise, Oslo is a repository and a modelling language and tooling to facilitate building and deploying mega composite systems. Expect the first CTP at PDC.

Weekly blogs of interest - 7 Sep 2008

2008-09-07T01:44:00.001-07:00

J. D. Miers from Patterns and Practices continues his Application Architecture Guide with an article on Layers & Components.

The famous Don Box gives his elevator talk on Oslo.

The second CTP of MEF (managed extensibility framework) is now on Codeplex. See announcements from Glen Block(ex Prism), Brad Abrams, Hammett (the guy behind Castle Windsor) and Krzysztof Cwalina. That's some pretty heavyweight people who are involved - so it's certainly worth watching. In the meantime we'll be sticking with Unity for now, but we'll be taking close look.

Blaine Wastell and David Hill have blogged about the latest plans for Prism 2.0

Karl Shifflett has created what looks like a pretty cool XAML Power Toy for WPF for now.

The F# September 2008 CTP has been announced by Soma. Lots of blogging activity about the new functional programming language.

Mike Taulty has posted some WPF examples and also has an article about why XBAPS are Rich Internet Applications

David Starr has an interesting idea about how to judge if your products are "technically current".

Josh Smith is a fan of MVVM and shows off another example.

Yet another top dev is joining Microsoft. Andrew Peters, co-founder of Mindscape (WPF Property Grid & Lightspeed) will be working on Entity Framework.

First day of Spring blog links

2008-08-31T21:13:00.001-07:00

Hello Prism 2.0 - WPF & Silverlight mashed

http://blogs.msdn.com/dphill/archive/2008/08/31/hello-prism-2-0.aspx

F# Optimization Modeling Language Sample Utilizing Microsoft Solver Foundation

http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/archive/2008/08/30/f-optimization-modeling-language-sample-utilizing-microsoft-solver-foundation.aspx

Codeplex WPF property grid

http://www.codeplex.com/wpfpropertygrid

QuickGraph 2.0: Generic Graph Data Structures and Algorithms for .Net.- Shortest path, etc

http://www.codeplex.com/quickgraph

WPF RSS reader

http://www.codeplex.com/paperboy

MS Surface home page

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/index.html

Josh Smith on MV-V-M

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/AttachedBehaviors.aspx

Extensible Framework Design Studio Released

http://blogs.msdn.com/kcwalina/archive/2008/08/30/8910353.aspx

September MSDN mag

Useful articles on Prism, WPF routed events, dependency properties in WFP, & SQL Server 2008 data hierarchies

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/magazine/cc895445.aspx

Article on Iron Python

http://www.code-magazine.com/Article.aspx?quickid=0809071

Clone detective for Visual Studio

http://weblogs.asp.net/paulomorgado/archive/2008/08/28/clone-detective-for-visual-studio.aspx

More .NET languages for VS / Shell

http://www.atalasoft.com/cs/blogs/rickm/archive/2008/08/28/visual-studio-shell-2008-is-bringing-more-net-languages-into-the-visual-stuido-fold.aspx

Building a generic IoC wrapper.

http://www.codeinsanity.com/2008/08/building-generic-ioc-wrapper.html

A WPF ah-ha moment

http://weblogs.asp.net/sweinstein/archive/2008/08/27/the-wpf-ah-ha-moment.aspx

PostSharp - AOP for .NET

2008-06-03T00:18:00.001-07:00

I stumbled across PostSharp, an open source project to provide aspect-oriented programming(AOP) to .NET developers.

Of interest too are some additions to PostSharp:

PostSharp4Unity
PostSharp4EF - PostSharp 4 Entity Framework, which turns plain old C# (POCO) objects into EF-aware entities

Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework

2008-06-03T00:04:00.001-07:00

Yesterday the June 2008 CTP of Microsoft Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5 was released. There is also an MSDN developer centre. I watched a 20 minute video which walked through some of the samples - worth a look. The presenter (Daniel Moth - "the Moth") said that they are focused on the API surface at this stage in the lifecyle and not much has been done on performance. Look in the download at the chm doco for some good ideas about how software can start to take advantage of multi-cores.

Long Time No Write

2008-05-20T01:11:00.001-07:00

So long since the last post :-(

Have come across quite a few interesting posts recently.

The VS/VSTS/TFS 2008 SP1 beta seems to signal a new direction for Microsoft. It hardly fits the criteria for a SP, and if they continue this approach, I think it will mean significant updates at least every year. It also explains why Rosario has been delayed.

A few posts in the unit testing / mock area:-

Rhino Mocks 3.5 Beta Download with Arrange Act Assert Syntax
MbUnit is yautf
Typemock isolator claims to be able to do what other mocking frameworks can do, but without relying on dependency injection, and
Gallio - an automation platform for unit test frameworks

"Alachisoft has released NCache Express 3.2, a FREE in-memory distributed object cache for .NET. NCache Express lets you scale up your .NET application performance by caching frequently used application data close-by and reducing expensive database trips. NCache Express is totally FREE to use and is not a trial version." More

There are some WPF videos around SP1. I watched the David Teitlebaum one which showed some cool effects - but just got to work out where we could use them!

Some good ideas re the use of ReSharper.

Good to see that Unity (1.1) is now a part of EntLib 4.0, which indicates a good future for it when coupled with Krzysztof Cwalina's article on MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) which implied that Unity will morph in the .NET framework after it's passed the test of time".

There's also been a good series on how Microsoft Dev Division uses Team System. Latest post is chapter 7 on risk.

Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries

2007-10-04T01:16:00.001-07:00

Scott Guthrie has announced that Microsoft will be releasing commented source code for some .NET 3.5 framework libraries here.

Technorati Tags: .NET 3.5

Software Factory Specialisation

2007-09-17T00:27:00.001-07:00

Jezza is one of the thought leaders in Microsoft about Software Factories. I thoroughly recommend his blog to anyone interested.

His latest post is about Software Factory verticalisation, ie how can we leverage off the essentially horizontal (cross-cutting) software factories that Microsoft P&P are developing, to specialise them for our particular (and narrower focussed) domain?

His post raises some interesting related issues about the practical application of software factories.

The current crop of horizontal factories - SCSF(Smart Client Software Factory), WCSF(Web Client Software Factory), WSSF(Web Service Software Factory) - are all general purpose / cross cutting. They should provide a way of insulating / abstracting from the physical solution domain, eg .NET 2.0/3.0/3.5, etc.

The issue I'm raising is - how do we future proof our factory developed applications, to allow us to take advantage of ever changing technologies, and allow us to "easily" upgrade to the next version of our vertical or horizontal factories.

Without strategies to handle this, are we destined to have to rewrite / refresh our apps / products every few years ? If we accept this - then it's legacy / obsolescence by design, and we loose many / most of the gains we have made by using a software factory approach.

It seems to me that the answer lies with modelling (via DSLs) so that our IP assets are maximised in (DSL) models and other factory assests, and we "just" have to update the mappings to lower levels when they change.

But with the factory approach spanning vertical factories to horizontal factories to physical solutions, this introduces some interesting configuration management and upgrade challenges.

Also "interesting" is the choice of which horizontal factory (from Microsoft P&P) you should use. For our smart client product line, we were planning to use the SCSF, but depending on who you talk to - development of it has either stopped / slowed to a crawl, and the supposed replacement is Acropolis. I don't see any evidence with Acropolis that they are taking a software factory approach. This is indeed a challenge for those of us who would like to embark on a software factory / product line approach.

Technorati Tags: Software Factory

What happened to the Treeview Icons?

2007-09-13T22:55:00.001-07:00

As part of the Extensibility implementation we have been looking into a bug in the last day or so, related to Icon images in a treeview. The bug is that in Windows XP the icon images didn't appear, in Vista they did, for the same EXE. The odd part? It was working in both until just recently.

So what happened?

As part of doing a review, and some related bug fixes, I noticed that the visual styles weren't enabled, so I 'fixed' them. Now I'm running Windows Vista, so simply putting Application.EnableVisualStyles before Application.Run worked beautifully. You might ask why this hadn't been done earlier, well it had, sort of. The application starts multiple threads, with a message loop and form on each, there are reasons for this that I won't go into here. The bug I fixed was when I notice we'd only called Application.EnableVisualStyles on the initial thread, and I added the call into each new thread.

As I said, this worked swimmingly for me, but a while later when the other Devs got the latest code (they're using Windows XP) things got interesting. There is a treeview on the form and it's icon had disappeared! But only on the Windows XP machines?? I tried running the EXE on my Vista machine and the images appeared, so it's obviously a runtime issue and not a compile time one.

The answer, a lesson learned long ago but unfortunately forgotten. Under Windows XP the Application.EnableVisualStyles exhibits some interesting behaviour. I'm not going to try to explain why, I'll defer to those more knowledgeable in this area. I found a Code Project article and an old but informative blog that I think do a good job of explaining the issue.

Note that as part of the fix for this you must call Application.EnableVisualStyles and Application.DoEvents BEFORE you call the constructor for the form. This is due to the message loop and is explained in the blog article referred to above.

Technorati Tags: EnableVisualStyles , Windows XP , ImageList , TreeView

The Costs of Managed Code: The Avoidable and the Unavoidable

2007-09-09T15:43:00.001-07:00

Rico Mariani was recently appointed chief architect of Visual Studio. He's been blogging a lot about .NET performance over the last few years. His latest entry points to a talk he gave to Gamefest 2007 with the same title as this blog entry.

"This talk is for those who want to understand the inescapable performance consequences of the managed programming method: the things you cannot avoid and the things you can. The presentation explains those few characteristics of managed code, such as array bounds checking, application domain isolation, and write barriers, that profoundly affect the code generation at a primitive level. Comparing and contrasting the consequences for the .NET Compact Framework and the classic .NET runtime, the talk explains the reasons for these overheads, the benefits they provide, and what practices minimize the associated costs. Additionally, we discuss some commonly occurring costs, such as boxing, that aren't inherent to all managed code, and we offer some tips for minimizing those costs."

Also on his blog is a link to various articles on performance that he's written.

Interaction Design

2007-09-05T00:02:00.001-07:00

I've been reading Alan Cooper's book The Inmates are Running the Asylum. He makes a strong case for the discipline of Interaction Design. The inmates are developers and the Interaction Designers will ensure systems are built fit for purpose rather than matching the usually complex interaction idioms that developers build, because they are used to working with the complex. Definitely worth a read, so see me or Ben for a copy. Hunted around for some additional material, and came across Jenifer Tidwell's book Designing Interfaces which is pretty much available online. Also here are some links from Darryl Chantry, one of the UX presenters at TechEd : http://www.odannyboy.com, http://www.cameronmoll.com, http://www.adaptivepath.com, http://www.molecular.com, http://www.uie.com. Also worthy of a look is Shane Morris's blog.

Using TFS source control from Windows Explorer

2007-08-21T15:37:00.001-07:00

Benjamin Day Consulting have a $25 tool - "Dubbelbock TFS 2.0 lets you access Team Foundation Server (TFS) source control from Windows Explorer (explorer.exe). Now you can go to any file in an existing TFS Workspace, right-click and you'll then see the Dubbelbock TFS context menu with options like Check In, Check Out, Undo, and Get Latest." Could be very useful for document management. I've had a play with it and it seems to work fine - the only issue is that on some machines there is a problem with installing it :-( . It seems to install ok on Vista machines I got people to try, but not always successful on WinXP. I contacted the author and he's aware of the problem - offered me a free copy if I could find out what is "missing".

It also has a system tray utility that allows you to create "stencils" for work item types, and then create / edit work items using the stencils. This functionality is similar to the Codeplex project Fissum. As Microsoft have now released the Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Power Tools, which includes a work item templates feature, it's probably a better way to go.

A couple of diagnostic tools, Office ribbon, life for MFC

2007-08-12T03:23:00.001-07:00

Fábio Pedrosa talks about Snoop, "a great utility to explore running WPF applications. It displays the visual tree as well as properties and events. It can be used to map UI elements to the underlying project classes. This application is very similar to the famous Spy++, but for WPF applications. You can inspect the insides of any WPF application, including Microsoft Expression Blend (also a WPF application)."

Another Codeplex project - Source Code Outliner Power Toy - "is a Visual Studio extension that provides a tree view of your source code's types and members and lets you quickly navigate to them inside the editor."

The next one's a bit old but Jensen Harris has a set of 200+ posts all about The Office 2007 UI Bible.

In the June 2007 edition of MSDN magazine there's an article on how MFC has been souped up in Orcas "Most of the enhancements made to MFC focus on UI. When an MFC application is recompiled with Visual Studio "Orcas," it gets an automatic face-lift for Windows Vista—that is, common dialogs will be enhanced, toolbars will follow Windows Vista themes, and window frames and title bars will sport Aero™ transparency. This face-lift happens without modifying any code—all you need to do is recompile the application."

Build your app to look just like Visual Studio

2007-08-09T23:07:00.001-07:00

This one's for Winston.

With the VS 2008 SDK you can now build an app using the VS 2008 shell, and it's all for free.

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2008

TechEd 4 - Acropolis and SCSF

2007-08-09T23:00:00.001-07:00

Kathy Kam is a project manager on Acropolis so went along to see if Smart Client Software Factory can really be replaced by Acropolis - certainly not right now as we were warned that it's only very early stages with an expectation of a 2008 timeframe.

Didn't really get clear a picture of where Acropolis is being pitched from the preso - although she did say that they were getting inspiration from old MFC wizard and CAB/SCSF- so asked her a few questions afterwards.

Apparently the SCSF lives on with the next work being to include WPF, plus the teams are talking bi-weekly. This is different to the blog talk from Glenn Block when Acropolis was announced ("we currently have no further plans for SCSF releases"). To further questions, there was talk of plans for some level of migration tool (may just be a document) from SCSF to Acropolis, but that SCSF would be deprecated.

The picture that's forming for me is that Acropolis is something more lightweight than SCSF so not certain about its use for hard core apps.

Was a bit disappointing to see WPF transitions demo'd and very little about the patterns which underpin Acropolis.

So might be time to check out what looks to be a really comprehensive set of blog articles by Jeremy Miller - The Build Your Own CAB Series Table of Contents

Technorati Tags: SCSF, Acropolis, Smart Client

TFS & Rosario WI enhancements

2007-08-09T22:06:00.001-07:00

Brian Harry gives a summary of lots of work item enhancements that I've been looking for:

A focus on requirements and traceability. Among other things, the MSF CMMI guidance has been updated to include new work item types and reports. MSF Agile will be updated in the future.
Hierarchical work items for work breakdown and status rollups.
Extensible link types to be able to relate work in whatever ways fit your process.
Querying over links to enable traceability and easily answering hard questions about ongoing work.
Querying based on group membership to be able to scope to the people on your team easily.

On Codeplex there is now a 496 page book Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server which is sure to be riveting reading.

Technorati Tags: Rosario, Team System

TechEd 3 - Workflow

2007-08-09T21:26:00.001-07:00

Have been reading Matt Winkle's blog so good to see his preso. WF is definitely a dev's tool, but I asked him about how you could get more use out of the workflows that BAs create (in Visio).

Can host the WF designer of course, but not too friendly, can use a 3rd party product like K2 (which is based on WF), or can roll your own designer. Matt also suggested looking at Sharepoint Workflow Designer which uses an Outlook Email Rules type interface to enable authoring of workflows around Sharepoint 2007 lists.

So checked out the K2 guys and they have a tool which enables authoring of workflows using Visio 2007 and the wiring up to built-in "BlackPearl" wizards, or custom (Visual Studio) code. It only need runtimes for participants in workflows at cost of $A 200.

Technorati Tags: Workflow, Visio, WF

TechEd 2 - Project Server / TFS

2007-08-09T20:01:00.001-07:00

Went to a session on Project Server / Timesheets (sounds boring) to see if we could use the Project Server 2007 VSTS connector to get timesheeting for tasks, etc that we use in Team System. Timesheets in Project Server look very enterprisy (approvals, etc) so didn't look promising for task WIs. Asked the presenter about how TFS & Proj Server are aligning, and got the same answer as last year - sorry don't know much about that stuff that devs do.

Talked to the Process MeMtoR guys who have a RUP like methodology tool. They add an Owner field to WIT they track in MS Project (not sever), and map this field to resources in Project - so they can schedule on a team basis rather than AD users - see video.

TechEd post 1 - SQL Server 2008

2007-08-09T19:42:00.001-07:00

Went to a session by Don Kilen who's a product manager for SQL Server Katmai. Although SQL Sever 2008 will be launched in late Feb 08 with all th eother stuff, expect RTM in Q2/08. Interesting that that only features that they consider shippable make it into CTPs, and this includes the full doco. So I checked this out with the doco download (130Mb) and sure enough there was full doco on the new HierarchyID type, including a couple of lessons.

Some interesting features in the June & July CTPs:

"ORDPATH improvement provides an important new functionality to our customers who use hierarchical data. It provides a superior way of modeling hierarchies in SQL Server by introducing the HierarchyID system data type and corresponding built-in methods which are designed to make it easier to store, query and operate hierarchical data. HierarchyID is also optimized for representing trees, the most common type of hierarchical data."

FileStream data type which allows large binary data to be stored in the file system and yet remain an integral part of the database with transactional consistency

You can see what's in the CTPs here and a full list here

Other interesting features he mentioned are a sparse columns - so that you will be able to have up to 100K columns / table, spatial data types - a flat earth data type (GEOMETRY) and a round earth data type (GEOGRAPHY), and new index types for hierarchies, indexes on filtered values within columns, and spatial indexes.

Will also be improved compression on the fly with not too much performance impact (lots of CPU with multi-cores & I/O still relatively slow), and synchronized programming model (like Outlook / Exchange ? ) and virtual earth integration.

There is also a lot of samples on Codeplex - both MS & community and more info on the main Katmai link

Technorati Tags: SQL Server 2008, Katmai

Rich Applications

2007-08-02T15:29:00.001-07:00

Don Burnett has some interesting things to say about Rich Internet Applications, but I think that what is being said about the need for UX designers on dev teams equally applies to desktop and smart client apps.

Technorati Tags: UX

VS 2008 summary stuff

2007-08-02T15:21:00.001-07:00

The VS2008 SDK July CTP has been released as per the VSX Team Blog.

If you want the marketing view, there's a white paper to download

Technorati Tags: VS 2008

Microsoft's position re software modeling

2007-08-01T14:12:00.001-07:00

Microsoft has apparently shunned the modeling world by offering no software modeling tools, apart from giving us a diagramming tool like Visio. They have also turned their backs on UML and the OMG's Model Driven Architecture approach.

However there is plenty of backroom action with the Software Factories initiatives, and in particular the DSL (Domain Specific Language) technologies.

Pedro Silva points to an article in eWeek that gives a summary of what is happening in the modeling space in the industry.

Technorati Tags: Software Factory, DSL

Client PC stats

2007-08-01T13:56:00.001-07:00

As per Joseph Cooney's blog, Valve software, makers of games like half-life etc listed a high-level breakdown showing what the typical client PC specifications from the users of their software. The survey size is almost 1 million, but although obviously biased towards gamers, gives an indication of what people are using.

Quick overview of VSTS Web Access (Teamplain v 2)

2007-08-01T13:39:00.001-07:00

Brian Harry has posted an overview of TeamPlain v 2 with screen shots.

Good intro if you haven't used TeamPlain.

Technorati Tags: Team System, TFS

TeamPlain 2 - MS version available

2007-07-31T15:26:00.001-07:00

Brian Harry has announced that v2 is now available - and of course it's got a name change to "Team System Web Access Power Tool" - try to say that quickly !

Technorati Tags: Team System, TFS, WIT

FLEE - Fast Lightweight Expression Evaluator

2007-07-31T15:16:00.001-07:00

Eugene Ciloci has created a new project on Codeplex - FLEE. This work is also on CodeProject.

The project description says: "A .NET expression parser and evaluator that uses a custom compiler and lightweight codegen to compile expressions to IL and emit them to a dynamic method."

Worthy of a look.

Technorati Tags: Expression

Build your own Software Factory

2007-07-31T14:59:00.001-07:00

Jezz Santos and Edward Bakker have posted slides and recording of presentation they did at TechEd. Their talk is a summary of a series of blog articles they wrote earlier this year.

Although they won't be at Oz TechEd, Tom Hollander ( EntLib fame who is now back in Oz) has a session on Software Factories (ARC308 - Thu Aug 9 - 11:30am)

Technorati Tags: Software Factory

Runge Software R&D Blog

Stuff to look at – 09/09/09

Stuff to look at – 09/09/09

Stuff to look at – 09/09/09

25 August 2009

Backlight WPF / SL controls

Fri 17th July 2009

WPF

Blend / SL 3

TFS2010

MEF

10 July 2009

Expression Blend 3 & SilverLight 3 go RC

9 July 2009

Tue 7 July 2009

Reflections

WPF

I18N

Iron Ruby

Thu 25 June 2009

Fri 19 June 2009

Workflow 4 and other stuff

Interesting links for 2 June 09

Too Lazy to do more than cut/paste links from RSS Bandit tabs :-(

Prism

WPF

Getting ready for Windows 7

Other

Notes

Notes

Just before Easter Holiday

MIX highlights

UX

General

It's Tuesday

WPF

UX

Other

Project almost finished

WPF

MVVM videos

UX stuff

Other

Friday notes

Notes

General

UX

Notes

ESENT (Extensible Storage Engine) API in the Windows SDK

F# To Ship with Visual Studio 2010

SFS for Microsoft Visual Studio

The Visual Studio 10 CTP VPC expired! What should I do?

Free Entity Framework eBook

Last list before Christmas

Interesting Silverlight stuff

Build for multi-cores now!

Software Factories resurface as "Blueprints"

New stuff - 11 November

StyleCop violations as you type

VS2010 goes WPF

Other new stuff

Distributed Development

PDC without the cost & jet lag

PDC announcements....

LINQ to SQL being killed off ?

PDC Summaries

P&P Guidance

New Versions of Unity, EntLib, WPF data grid

Fire Hose Drinking Time

App Arch Guide

Prism, WPF and Scrum

25th Oct weekly trawl

Vista, Windows 7, .NET 4

WPF related

Other

20 Oct 08 - Interesting Stuff

WPF & UX finds

Windows 7, SQL Server & .NET stuff

Back after a holiday

The Future of Expression Blend