When I wrote my first article, which I find rather embarrasing today, back in February 2003, I never imagined that I would write 49 more. It took me about five and a half years to reach fifty articles, but that’s OK…it’s not a race! If you are interested, you can see a listing of all my articles here.
I decided to do something special for my fiftieth article. I won’t bother explaining it here, but trust me, it’s pretty cool (in my opinion)…
I fixed Panel3D so that its child elements can be transparent. The updated source code and demo applications are now available for download from the CodeProject article:
On Saturday Karl Shifflett and I gave an all-day “WPF for Line-Of-Business Applications” track at the Charlotte code camp. We had a very good turn out, and a lot of fun. The number of people in the sessions who are already using WPF in their business’s applications is much higher than last year. WPF is starting to gain traction in the “real world.”
We attempted to record the sessions, but ran into some technical difficulties that we didn’t have time to troubleshoot and fix. Next time we give the presentation, we will try to record it again.
Here are my presentation materials. Sorry, but I cannot include the demo project for the second session (don’t ask why, it’s complicated…): My Presentation Materials
When you download the file, change the extension from .DOC to .ZIP and then decompress it.
Also, thanks to Infragistics for flying me down to North Carolina and supplying so many great hand-outs for the attendees. Thanks to Microsoft for buying so many awesome meals!! Also, thanks to Karl for organizing the WPF for LOB track, and the amazingly fun night out on the town afterwards. Saturday night was an AWESOME experience for everyone!
On Saturday May 17th, 2008 (i.e. tomorrow) Karl Shifflett and I will be giving an all-day presentation about using WPF to create line-of-business (LOB) applications. So if you are anywhere near Charlotte, North Carolina, and want to learn about WPF for LOB, stop on by! It’s free to register and attend.
You can read more about it here. Karl has posted his excellent demo application, which will be the focal point of his three sessions here. I will post my presentation material directly after it finishes, since some of my material will be created during the sessions.
Microsoft has announced the updates to Cider (the WPF designer in Visual Studio 2008 ) that will be part of SP1. Some of these improvements sound great! You can check out the entire announcement, but I’ve pasted the really interesting part below:
Features and functionalities that are new, changed, or improved
New features and new functionalities
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The Properties window now contains the Events tab. The Events tab lets you create events, assign events, and review events.
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The Properties window now includes a category sort option and an alphabetical sort option to allow for faster property location.
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Code changes have been made to the XAML Refactor/Rename definition and to the Go to definition. These changes allow XAML rename operations to occur automatically. Additionally, you can navigate the XAML definition by pressing F12.
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You can now drag controls or create controls from the toolbox in XAML view or in Design view. You can do this even if you use a split view configuration.
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Snaplines are now implemented for control margins. This lets the designer control a fixed distance from other controls, from container edges, or from gridlines.
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Tab controls now support TabItem activation and TabItem design. To do this, click the tab that you want to design.
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The Expander control now expands conditionally based on what is selected. You can design the contents of the Expander control at design time with affecting the IsExpanded attribute of the runtime.
Improved features and improved functionalities
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Many stability improvements have been added to Visual Studio 2008 SP1. These include improvements to document loading in the designer and to error reporting. Because of these improvements, you will be able to load more documents in the designer.
My Podder Skinning Competition is officially one notch cooler now. Microsoft has offered to give each of the winners an 8 GB green Zune! That was a nice surprise!!
By the way, the most sought-after prize seems to be the steak dinner at Smith & Wollensky. Three people have already sent me e-mails saying that they are going to submit a skin into the competition just so that they can have me buy them a steak dinner. LOL! If you’ve ever been to Smith and Wollensky, I’m sure you understand…
I am excited to announce that I am hosting a new WPF competition!! This contest allows you to create and submit your own skin for Podder, the WPF podcast player application. Since Podder was built to support “structural skinning” it can use any UI that you dream up to display its data and behavior. This contest will allow participants to focus on using WPF to create an awesome user experience, without needing to worry about writing the underlying application functionality.
The Podder Skinning Competition, along with all the rules, prizes, and dates, is fully explained on this page of my blog. I also put together a step-by-step walkthrough of getting started with creating your own Podder skin, which you can check out here.
I look forward to seeing the creative Podder skins that people submit. This is a very exciting time to be a WPF developer or designer!
I just published an article to CodeProject showing my new Panel3D class. The article is accompanied by a fairly interesting demo application that makes it easy to find appealing configurations for the panel’s 3D scene. If you are interested, here is the link:
Dr. WPF is amazingly brilliant. He figured out a way to create a panel whose children are neither visual or logical children, but simply “conceptual” children. This allows for many great things, including the ability to host the child elements in 3D space. His excellent article about the topic, with source code, can be found here.
I have been working closely with the good Doctor over the past week. His conceptual panel work has been the foundation of my new developments in displaying the items of a 2D ListBox as interactive, animated 3D objects. I will be writing about this exciting topic soon, but for now, just to whet your appetite…
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Posted by Josh Smith
