Just a few weeks since the .NET 3.0 has been released and I feel a little dissapointed. I was expecting a lot of new amazing stuff popping up like a mushrooms after the rain, but no, it's a bit quiet like everyone is afraid of using the new .NET. Finally, I've found the very first cool thing today -...
Frequently, when building a UI, one finds themself setting various appearance related properties over and over again. For example, you may want all the label text in your app to be a bold Trebuchet 12px font. This is easy to do with css in a web app, but not as straight forward with WinForms. WPF recognizes...
Derik Whittaker , a very experienced WinForms developer, has written a post about his initial frustrations with WPF since its recent release. He brings up some very valid points and asks why he should bother with it anymore. I would like to address some of his questions and concerns and hopefully show...
Databinding and Data Templates are perhaps the most powerful features of WPF. Whatever your experiences with databinding in previous technologies, MS or otherwise, I think you will be impressed with the new goods. To begin with, support for datadinding is built into WPF from its core. Almost every graphics...
Introduction Rob Eisenberg and I are writing a game in .NET 3.0. We entered the game into Microsoft Code Master Challenge and we made the semi-finals. Today we had to make a 20 minute online presentation to a panel of judges using Microsoft's new Live Meeting, and while the presentation did not go as...
In the last part I covered the basics of Xaml and how you can use it to define various UI constructs. When building a UI, one of the first issues you’ll deal with is how to arrange all of the UI pieces on screen. In previous MS technologies we have had limited support for layout. .NET 2.0 offers...
Xaml stands for eXtensible Application Markup Language. You can think of it as HTML for Windows applications, but it is really quite a bit more expressive and powerful. For those of you code junkies out there, Xaml is really no more than a special type of CLR object serialization. It was intentionally...
Windows Presentation Foundation (hereafter referred to as WPF) is a new API for creating graphical user interfaces for the Windows platform. It is an alternative to WinForms that further empowers developers by providing an API capable of taking full advantage of the multimedia facilities of the modern...
Over the past month or so I’ve had the privilege of giving a presentation titled “.NET 3.0 Overview and Key Concepts” to several groups. The main idea of this presentation was to help people get familiar with the capabilities of the new technology and have a better understanding of...