Essential WPF

Internet via Acer Aspire 1420p 3G by Tomer Shamam

To all the lucky guys (like me :-) attended to the Microsoft PDC 09 conference last week, and won an acer touch tablet PC, here is how you can use the built-in 3G modem (yes it has such) to connect the Internet using your local cellular vendor. First, make sure that you have a data package. Now do as follows: Turn off your machine, and remove the battery Insert your USIM+ card to the sim slot (you may hear the click sound while pushing) Connect the battery and turn on your machine While logged in...

Session - Building Extensible Rich Internet Applications with the Managed Extensibility Framework by Tomer Shamam

In this great session, Glenn Block and my collegue Ariel Ben Horesh have talked about Managed Extensibility Framework for Silverlight 4 for building customizable applications that can easily be extended by third parties. Whether you are building an extensible data grid, a custom rules engine, a pluggable editor, or a composite application such as a pluggable CRM system, you want to learn about MEF. They explained how to use MEF to decouple applications into more maintainable the application into...

Windows Presentation Foundation 4 Plumbing and Internals by Tomer Shamam

In this session we saw the inside scoop on how Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) powers all its rich services – like layout, databinding, and animation. There is a lot of heavy lifting done for you under the hood; in this session, we crack open these system components, including the trees (visual, logical, and inheritance), the property system and its change notification, and a few of the routing systems that all messages go through. Bring your hard-hat for this one! WPF Involves lots of interacting...

Session – Advanced Topics for Building Large-Scale Applications with Microsoft Silverlight by Tomer Shamam

In this session, John Papa talked about Silverlight application development patterns such as composite applications with Prism, developing using the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, and methods of implementing large, modular, multi-page applications within your team. Also he talked about frameworks created to help assist in rapid development using these patterns without sacrificing good application development patterns. MVVM is a pattern, there is no specific way to do it right. Also with Silverlight...

Session – Building Line of Business Applications With Silverlight 4 by Tomer Shamam

In this nice session David Poll has talked about enhancements to data binding and data validation as well as new support for rich text & printing in the platform that allow you to build compelling LOB user experiences. Everyday we work with data so we usually deal with Interactivity, Entry and Presentation In this talk he explained about features added to SL 4 SL4 in Visual Studio 2010 Data Binding enhancements Data related controls enhancements Input validation Printing a document David shown...

Session - Media Foundation: Supporting Hardware Codecs and Cameras by Tomer Shamam

In this very intersting session, Stan Pennington talked about how Windows 7 adds support in native code for accelerating media transcoding and specific playback experiences through the new asynchronous Media Foundation transform (MFT) model. How to write and use accelerated MFTs, and how to license for preference in Windows Media Player and portable device operations with Windows Shell. He showed a managed sample using the transcoding API, and showed how the new Device Proxy simplifies AVStream driver...

Session - Advanced WPF Application Performance Tuning and Analysis by Tomer Shamam

In this great WPF performance session, Bart De Smet and Eric Harding have talked about WPF performance and demonstrates some of the performance tools the WPF team uses. One of the important things to do regards performance is to start measure early. Perceived performance, make it feel fast, turn it to an art and not a science. There would be trade offs – CPU versus memory, etc. Memory New WPF application called FishBowl has been announced. It’s a small application dealing with facebook as a case...

Session - How Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Was Built with WPF 4 by Tomer Shamam

Paul Harrington talked about the new WPF UI of Visual Studio 2010, the start page and many other designers, displaying the Visual Studio 2010 WPF visual tree using Snoop. Architectural reason is one of the reasons Visual Studio 2010 has been reprogrammed to use WPF 4.0. Separated presentation and support for long range road map. He also explained that VS 2010 features really need it: Editors, Architect designer editor, Parallel tools, Workflow designer and more Another reason is to make it easy to...

Live from PDC 09 Keynote – Product Maturity by Tomer Shamam

The cloud computing, Windows Azure, System Center and server tools for Windows and more platforms Azure tools for Java and Eclipse are the main topics that Ray Ozzie has mentioned. You can get more details from Noam’s and Alex's blog, he is a great writer :-) Ray also announced Dallas CTP for discovery, exploring and using data in a new way. In the bottom line azure is much more mature than the last year, and there are many new tools for hosting applications in the cloud. Waiting for more information...

Live from PDC 09 Keynote by Tomer Shamam

We are here, 20 people from Sela Group, wearing blue, waiting for the PDC 09 keynote to begin. The hall is full of people, and there are many other entering, seeking a seat. Comparing to PDC 08, there are less people, and its of course due to the economic situation, but the decoration here in the hall is awesome, and we’ve already got 3D glasses… I’m too curious to know why. Ozzie is here… please excuse me, I’ve got something to do here… :-)

Blend Behaviors via Attached Properties – Part 3 by Tomer Shamam

Recall my previous post, I’ve talked about how to implement custom Actions. In this post I would like to explain how to implement custom Triggers. As you may already know, trigger is the cause and action is the effect of that cause. The question is, why would you like to implement a custom trigger? So lets start with a little example: Blend 3 comes with only event triggers. But what if you want to invoke an action when property changes? For that reason you would like to implement a custom trigger...

Live from PDC09 by Tomer Shamam

We are here! 20 people from Sela Group are proud to be part of the PDC 09 great conference. We are here for updating you with the most up to date Microsoft technologies. I’m going to concentrate on the following topics: Windows 7 Development Visual Studio 2010 WPF 4.0 Silverlight UI Architecture So prepare your RSS reader and stay tuned, we are going to blast this blog server with great stuff directly from the PDC halls.

Blend Behaviors via Attached Properties – Part 2 by Tomer Shamam

In my previous post I’ve talked about Blend 3 attached behaviors, and explained how to use them. In this post I would like to dive into more details, explaining the differences between Triggers, Actions and Behaviors types and how to create custom triggers. Triggers and Actions Actually blend 3 attached behavior comes in two flavors: Triggers and Actions Behaviors You can think of triggers and actions as cause-and-effect relationships. Trigger represents the cause. For example we want to do something...

Blend Behaviors via Attached Properties – Part 1 by Tomer Shamam

Up until Blend 3, UI designers had difficult time prototyping a real functional UI. The main problem was the lack of behaviors. Creating a UI prototype that deals with navigation, window creation on event, animation on data changes etc, usually ends up with source code development. And when it comes to coding, UI designers had to have kind of developer colleague. XAML Tools Over time, developers (like me :) created many XAML extensions using both XAML Markup Extensions and the powerful Attached Property...

<howto> Start Animation on Model property changed </howto> by Tomer Shamam

Lately I’m teaching UI designers to work with WPF, and one of my students asked me how to start an animation when model’s property changes, and this was my answer: If the animated element is part of a DataTemplate, use DataTrigger to monitor data changes and to start the animation. But if you don’t have a DataTemplate or the animated element is not part of the DataTemplate, create a Style for that element, and use a simple DataTrigger within. < Style x : Key ="PathStyle" TargetType ...