It's Tuesday

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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.