The Book of WPF

Ever wonder what types of applications people are building in WPF ? It can be hard to just stumble across them as they are typically products, or applications behind firewalls. Luckily, we now have the Book of WPF . The Book is a nicely produced PDF with screen shots and information about each of the apps being showcased.

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The Book of WPF

24 Hour 50% off Deal on my Upcoming Manning Book: Silverlight in Action, Revised Edition

On Wednesday February 10, 2010 my book is on sale at Manning for 50% off.That’s print, MEAP, e-book or any combination of the bunch. This is a special thanks for blog subscribers and twitter followers. To get the discount, visit my book page on Manning , choose the eBook or print book. When you’re ready to check out, enter the code: silver50now in the coupon code box. The coupon is good only for Silverlight in Action, Revised Edition. 50% off is pretty sweet.

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24 Hour 50% off Deal on my Upcoming Manning Book: Silverlight in Action, Revised Edition

Tip: New .NET 4 String Function to Check for Empty Strings

How many times have you written code similar to this? string firstName = FirstName.Text.Trim(); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(firstName)) { // do something } or if (someParam == null || string.IsNullOrEmpty(someParam.Trim()) throw new ArgumentException(”Empty string”, “someParam”); // do something A nice little time-saver for those guard functions is now included in .NET 4: the IsNullOrWhiteSpace function: if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(FirstName.Text)) { // do something } IsNullOrWhiteSpace checks for null, empty or whitespace characters. Sure, it’s a little thing, but it’s nice to have it in there, especially considering we get all sorts of nice new little things, and the client framework install is still smaller than it was in .NET 3.5

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Tip: New .NET 4 String Function to Check for Empty Strings

Getting Started with WPF 4: Button Controls Part 1 – The Button is a Content Control

I have an ongoing twitter search for topics of interest to me and my position at Microsoft, so anything with words like “windows forms”, wpf , windowsclient.net etc. all show up in my search. Thought that, I often find folks who are struggling with how to get started in WPF. I’ve been meaning to do some beginning WPF tutorials for a bit. Since the main focus of my job is to help people be successful with windows client developer technologies, I figured that would be a good idea. Scott Hanselman once described our job as “starting when you hit File-> New Project in Visual Studio” The latest tweet conversation went like this (latest post at top, starter at the bottom) I show this not to single out Christian, but to show one of the roadblocks folks new to WPF often hit: templating of controls. If you’re used to Windows Forms or even ASP.NET, where purpose-built controls exist for the common scenarios, doing something as simple as creating a flat image button can be somewhat daunting

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Getting Started with WPF 4: Button Controls Part 1 – The Button is a Content Control

Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow RTW

Congratulations to the Microsoft Expression teams for another great release ! If you are an MSDN Premium subscriber, you’ll probably want to wait a week or so until Expression Studio 3 show up on MSDN. That will take about a week or so. The exciting news buried in that sentence is that MSDN Premium Subscribers will get all of Expression Studio 3 (including SketchFlow) as part of their subscription . You can download and install the trial now if you wish, but you’ll need to uninstall once you get the MSDN version.

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Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow RTW

SketchFlow Control Explorer

In a previous post I showed a screenshot of all the controls available to you in SketchFlow.

ToggleButton Command for Prism

First night with Bing

I managed to score a trial code for the new Bing service from Microsoft. I was a bit skeptical, but thought I’d give it a try. I really like lots of things that come from Microsoft, but I never cared for Live Search, and the name “Bing” is just, umm, silly. At least it isn’t Windows Live Bing XP 2010 SP3 Crosby Edition or something I assume the name change came for a number of reasons, not the least of which was to put some distance between the search property and the overall Microsoft brand. This isn’t a bad idea as the Microsoft brand is probably weakest when it comes to web properties. Of course, the first thing I did was a vanity search. Third link down? Oh Bing, flattery will get you everywhere (no, none of those pictures, including the horse pull, are of me) Then for grins I typed in a question “what is silverlight?”. The resulting ads were amusing. I think I’ll run right on over to Amazon or ShopZilla and get me some low low prices on Silverlight . Of course, you see these types of ads in every search engine. I did find it interesting that the Silverlight team took out an ad (top ad on the page) I also did a video search. The in-place video thumbnails are pretty fast and impressive. The thumnailing algorithm pieces together a couple seconds of start footage, some footage from several different spots within the video, and right near the end. Unfortunately, all the videos are displayed using Flash, even the Silverlight video from my blog. Also, the returned videos didn’t seem to quite line up with the search. This is another common search engine issue as they tend to use text on the page instead of pulling metadata from the video itself. In addition, most folks don’t put that type of metadata in their videos. Here’s the result of a video search for “pete brown c64”. For some reason, it picked up tons of stuff from Silverlight.net (not sure if it has some affinity algorithm or what as my name doesn’t appear on any of those pages). The video I was actually looking for is all the way down at the bottom right; so at least it did pick it up on the first page of results. Shopping Next I tried a shopping query. I typed in simply ‘30” display’ without anything else. I got back a bunch of results as well as some category information on the left. I clicked on the “electronics” category, and the results list was instantly filtered down to 30” displays and accessories. I was puzzled by this result: Now, turns out Amazon is to blame (their catalog is complete crap in some areas): Changing my query to 30” monitor gave me better results. Well, except for this one:

The DZone interviews Hamilton Verissimo on MEF

The DZone has a nice interview with Hamilton on MEF .

8 Essential Applications

The past couple weeks I got two new computers.