Karl Shifflett’s Magnum Opus

My good friend and comrade in crime, Karl Shifflett, recently published a huge body of excellent work.  He has been working for quite some time on Ocean, a code generation system that blows my mind, and BBQ Shack, a great line-of-business WPF and Silverlight application that is built by Ocean.  His prolonged effort has resulted in some high-quality software and documentation (including videos!).

I highly suggest you set aside some time to check out what Karl has been up to.  It’s amazing work.

My hat is off to you, Karl!

WPF graph that detects circular dependencies

I spent the weekend having a blast writing a WPF app that displays an interactive object graph, and detects/highlights circular dependencies. It was so much fun, that I decided to publish an article about it on CodeProject.

Here’s a screenshot of the app:

The app uses Charles Petzold’s ArrowLine element, PropertyObserver and ObservableObject from my MVVM Foundation library, DragCanvas from WPF.JoshSmith, and ContentControl3D from Thriple.

If you want to check it out, here’s the article:

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

Enjoy!

The “From Russia with Love” way to create ViewModels

I just published an article about a technique I use to streamline and simplify the way that ViewModels are created in an MVVM app.  I’m not saying that this is the “right” way to do things, but simply something I find useful.  Enjoy!

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

Article about a WPF data matrix control

I just published an article to CodeProject called ‘Displaying a Data Matrix in WPF‘.  This one was definitely a labor of love. 🙂

Enjoy!

Article about UX design for multi-touch systems

An article by Joel Eden, a colleague of mine at Infragistics, was recently published in Dr. Dobb’s. The article is called ‘Designing for Multi-Touch, Multi-User and Gesture-Based Systems‘.   It touches on the very interesting topic of how to design good user experiences for the next generation of multi-touch systems, such as Microsoft Surface applications.  This is something that I have been wondering about, so I was thrilled to discover this article.  It is very well written and explains the subject matter in a clear, understandable way.  For example, here’s an excerpt that I find very thought provoking…

If gestures are already so much a part of our cognitive processing then in some ways, the growing excitement around gesture-based systems is a sign that software systems are finally catching up to how we already think and behave, rather than really representing an innovative way of interacting with information.

You can read the article here: http://www.ddj.com/architect/216402697

Article about ContentControl3D on CodeProject

I just published an article on CodeProject about ContentControl3D, which is a control in my Thriple project on CodePlex.  You can check the article out here:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/ContentControl3D.aspx

Enjoy!

Optimizing DataTemplates

Charles Petzold hit a homerun!  His ‘Writing More Efficient ItemsControls‘ article in the March 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine is the first treatment I’ve ever seen on how to analyze and address performance issues related to the use of DataTemplates and ItemsControls.  He uses empirical evidence to identify performance issues related to a DataTemplate, and shows various ways to improve them.

After reading the article, I am definitely going to go through some templates I’ve created and reassess them.  If you are interested in keeping your WPF applications running quickly, I suggest you check it out.

My MVVM article in MSDN Magazine

Finally!  After spending more than 100 hours over several months working on an article for MSDN magazine, it is now published!  The article is about using the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) design pattern to create WPF applications.  My ‘WPF Apps With The Model-View-ViewModel Design Pattern‘ article is in the February 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine.  I think it is by far my best, and most important, article yet.   Big thanks go to John Gossman for giving me an in-depth tech review.

Enjoy!

Creating an internationalized WPF Wizard

Karl Shifflett and I have been hard at work on a WPF Wizard application that is fully globalized and localized.  I just published an article about it on CodeProject, and am extremely happy with how it turned out.  If you’re interested in reading it, here’s the link:

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

Conserving screen real estate via the adorner layer

I spent the weekend building and expanding on my previous work adorning XamDataGrid with editor controls.  I made leaps and bounds of progress, and am very excited about the result.  As much of the functionality that can be abstracted away now lives as an attached behavior, called DisplayAdornerEditors.  I wrote a big post about it on my other blog, so if you’re interested, I highly recommend you check it out here!

WPF is amazing!