Essential WPF

Windows 8 Dilemma – Could it run your Enterprise Applications? by Tomer Shamam

As it was cleared out by Microsoft about three months ago, Windows 8 based devices, running on top of ARM based CPU’s won’t be able to run existing x86 and x64 software. The only option will be running Windows 8 Metro Style applications (though the OS API’s are the same, meaning you can recompile the application and device drivers with few difficulties and have them running on top of ARM based CPU’s in desktop mode). Having this in mind, and that the Desktop mode should be considered for “legacy...

My Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Best Feature - Microsoft Help Viewer 1.1 for by Tomer Shamam

As you may already know, Microsoft released the first service pack for Visual Studio 2010. And yes, there are tons of improvements, bug fixes, crash fixes and performance issues. I think SP1 is great for the developers and I really appreciate that.   One of the most annoying and frustrating features came out with Visual Studio 2010 is the poor web-based help center. Up until VS2010 came out we where used to have a great help viewer, and then Boom… it was gone!   Fortunately, the Microsoft...

Resources in WPF are Shared and Lazy by default by Tomer Shamam

I’ve just read a post of Christian Mosers listing “ Top 10 WPF Performance Tips ”. I agree with most of them, as they are general tips, but except for one: “ Load resources when needed . Even thow it's the most comfortable way to merge all resources on application level it can also cost performance by loading all resources at startup. A better approach is to load only often used resources and load the other on view level” Resources in WPF are lazy load and shared by default. If you place a resource...

UI Virtualization vs. Data Virtualization (Part 1) by Tomer Shamam

Part 2 Being an LOB, composite applications infrastructure junky lately, I’ve been working around with several data-binding models and mechanisms to bind the data with the view, in a very efficient way of course. Sometime it was easy, and sometime it was not! I have had to find several workarounds to overcome both architectural and performance issues. In this post I would like to concentrate on Data Virtualization, and to compare it with UI Virtualization, which are very similar, yet different aspects...

WPF + MEF = Declarative Composite UI by Tomer Shamam

I’ve been playing around with MEF lately and I have to say that it has a great potential for building Composite UIs. One of the sample applications arrived with MEF Preview 6 (called MEFLook) , demonstrates how to implement kind of Outlook composite application based on WPF. The interesting part of this application is that views can be imported into the main window as dynamic parts, simply by decorating them with the MEF Export attribute. < Window x : Class ="MeflookSample.MeflookShell"...

WPF Designer and Developer Collaboration by Tomer Shamam

From time to time I read posts and see questions regard the collaboration between WPF developer and designer. So I decided to say few words about my experience and point of view. There are two popular models for developer/designer collaboration with WPF The designer mockup the UI , handing it to the developer for adding logic. With this model it is advised that the designer will be part of the team, and there should be a tight integration between the developer and the designer. I don’t like this...

10 Reasons to Love XAML by Tomer Shamam

Many of my customers and students ask me: What is XAML good for? Why do I have to write XAML if I can write WPF with code? So I decided to write a post about it, sorted by the most important to the less essential. 1. It’s the Designer best friend WPF is not just about another UI platform, it’s also a methodology. It provides new tools and concepts for creating a modern presentation layer. Programmers write code, but when it comes to drawing…, OMG! To overcome this problem, a new member is introduced...