nerd + art

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 8:41:42 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Nerd + Art was one of the presentations at Mix 08 that was presented by Identify Mine.  It was to help the artiest release their inner nerd.  It was a group of 10 snippets that could be used in Visual Studio to help artists add certain capabilities to their working models / prototypes of WPF applications.  Those same snippets are also pretty helpful for someone getting up and going on WPF.

nerdsnippets

Interest in REST

Thursday, March 13, 2008 1:24:44 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

If your interested in REST you can hear some industry experts talk about it in a open discussion podcast over on Jeff Brand's blog.

Using WPF for Business Applications

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 9:14:38 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Here is the presentation that I did today at the Microsoft office in Minneapolis today.  It was a segment on real world WPF.  It discusses how WPF isn't just about the cool North Face demo or the New York Times Reader, but there is advantages for using it in every day enterprise applications.  The presentation and source can be found below.  The demo's include sample WPF implementations for Authorization, Application Activity Monitoring and Highlighted Search similar to what you experience when you search in Outlook.  None of the examples are currently at production quality, but with a little polish they could get there.

Authorization UI

Demonstrates how to use attached properties on different UI elements to change whether they are hidden or disabled based on the users authorization for a specific UI Element.  The authorization UI is mocked up, but should give you an idea of how you can extend any UI Element with property metadata to help in the UI authorization scenario.

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Application Activity Monitoring

Demonstrates how you can implement monitoring of the mouse and keyboard to determine if you should disable the UI of the application... in this implementation it will blur after 5 seconds of no activity.  This implementation still needs some work... you can still edit data after the screen has blurred and there is no login dialog which would pop up after the blur has taken place so you can resume work.

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Highlighted Search

Similar to how Microsoft Outlook highlights the search term as you type, this implementation demonstrates a simplified version using a listbox.  There is a bunch of sample data... you can test it out with up to 10,000 records.  If you want to generate more seed data, you can use the seed data api that I put together.

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Mix08 Keynote & Announcements

Wednesday, March 05, 2008 8:22:16 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

This isn't a summary of all the announcements, just a couple of one that I thought were notable.  If you want to see the actual keynote or any of the sessions they have all been recorded and are up on the Mix08 site. Some of the things that I found interesting included:

 

IE 8 Beta 1 is Available 

They have added some interesting features and extensibility mechanism to work with content on the web and are working to abide by the W3C standards for browsers.  Here is a recap of what will be in IE8

  • CSS Compliance
  • Start of implementing HTML 5
  • Web Slices
  • Activities

You can find more about the last two features here.

 

Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 Released 

They also announced that Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 was released.  Which has added the awaited support for a number of basic controls.  In the previous release the target was around rich media and a basic subset of xaml.

 

Blend 2.0 Beta 1 is available

Expression Blend Beta 2 was released.

 

Coolest Application Built on Silverlight 2.0

One of the most impressive demos of the keynote was the launch of Hard Rock Cafe's memorabilia collection based on Silverlight and SeaDragon.