Last Ten Blog Entries

If there's one thing that the Washington, DC area is known for is special interest groups.

But, here's one special interest group developers can love: CapArea.NET Sharepoint SIG.

And it has its inaugural meeting tonight with Sahil Mailk presenting SharePoint as an Application Development Platform.

[found via Andrew Duthie]

• Greg Schechter's Blog : A Series on GPU-based Effects for WPF
• Here's the Scoop: San Francisco to Turn Dog Poop Into Biofuel
• CoD 4 Techno Mix
  Song with only Call of Duty 4 gunfire sounds effects as the music.

Vikram Madan draws another cartoon that pretty much sums it all up.

By now, you've likely heard of Silverlight Cream, a daily digest of all that's new and exciting in the Silverlight world.

Rob Relyea has started something similar for WPF and Silverlight.

Today's post is chock full of information.

Scott Guthrie posted a plethora of information on the upcoming Service Pack 1 release for Visual Studio 2008.

There's a lot of content in the post. 

So read it several times to make sure you digest it all. ;)

Here are the WPF highlights, some of which were announced at MIX08 (emphasis added):

• WPF Performance Improvements

  .NET 3.5 SP1 includes several significant performance optimizations and improvements to WPF.  Some of the specific graphics improvements include:

  • Smoother animations
  • Hardware accelerated rendering of Blur and DropShadow Bitmap Effects
  • Text Rendering speed improvements - especially with VisualBrish and 3D scenes
  • 2D graphics improvements - especially with z-index scenarios
  • A new WriteableBitmap class that enables real-time and tear-free bitmap updates.  This enables custom "paint"-style applications, data visualizations, charts and graphs that optionally bypass the default WPF 2D graphics APIs.
  • Layered window performance improvements
    
• WPF Data Improvements

  .NET 3.5 SP1 includes several data binding and editing improvements to WPF.  These include:

  • StringFormat support within {{ Binding }} expressions to enable easy formatting of bound values
  • New alternating rows support within controls derived from ItemsControl, which makes it easier to set alternating properties on rows (for example: alternating background colors)
  • Better handling and conversion support for null values in editable controls
  • Item-level validation that applies validation rules to an entire bound item
  • MultiSelector support to handle multi-selection and bulk editing scenarios
  • IEditableCollectionView support to interface data controls to data sources and enable editing/adding/removing items in a transactional way
  • Performance improvements when binding to IEnumerable data sources
    
• WPF Extensible Shader Effects

  .NET 3.5 SP1 adds support in WPF for a new shader effects architecture and API that allows extremely expressive visual effects to be created and applied to any control or element within WPF.  These shader effects support blending multiple input compositions together.  What makes them particularly powerful is that WPF executes effects (including custom effects you build yourself) using the GPU - giving you fully hardware accelerated graphics performance.  Like almost everything in WPF, you can also use WPF databinding and animation on the properties of an effect (allowing them to be fully integrated into an experience).

• WPF Interoperability with Direct3D

  .NET 3.5 SP1 adds support to efficiently integrate Direct3D directly into WPF.  This gives you more direct access to the hardware and to take full advantage of the Direct3D API within WPF applications.  You will be able to treat Direct3D content just like an image within an application, as well as use Direct3D content as textures on WPF controls.   

• VS 2008 for WPF Improvements

  VS 2008 SP1 includes several significant improvements for WPF projects and the WPF designer.  These include:

  • Several performance improvements
  • Events tab support within the property browser
  • Ability to sort properties alphabetically in the property browser
  • Margin snaplines which makes form layout much quicker
  • Better designer support for TabControl, Expander, and grid computing
  • Code initiated refactoring now updates your XAML (including both control declarations and event declarations in XAML)
  • Go to Definition and Find All References now support things declared in XAML

  The debugger has also been updated in SP1 so that runtime errors in XAML markup (for example: referencing styles, datasources and/or other objects that don't exist)

The more I work with WPF (it's been over a year now) , the more I love it.

I can't imagine how I worked with Windows Forms for so long. ;)

Speaking of WinForms, WinForms gets new controls in SP1:

• Vector shapes (Line, Rectangle, Oval)
• Printing controls
• DataRepeater controls

Previously, I had heard that WinForms 2.0 was it for the technology and there was to be no new developments in the technology.

Has that changed? Or did these controls already exists? 

The screen shot implies that these controls were part of a VB control package.

• Coding Horror: XML: The Angle Bracket Tax
  The post makes some interesting points, but XML's upside is still greater than its downsides. Plus, there's always ZIP compression to get rid of the bloat.
• 'Pirates' maker to turn 'BioShock' into film - Games - msnbc.com
• Flow Diagram for Silverlight Cross-Domain Policy Checks

• Private space station prototype hits milestone - Space.com- msnbc.com
• Virtual Happiness: Faux Skylights and Windows For Rooms Without a View

Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, is putting the finishing touches on his new $2 billion home.

"Like many families with the means to do so, the Ambanis wanted to build a custom home. They consulted with architecture firms Perkins + Will and Hirsch Bedner Associates, the designers behind the Mandarin Oriental, based in Dallas and Los Angeles, respectively," the report said. "Plans were then drawn up for what will be the world's largest and most expensive home: a 27-story skyscraper in downtown Mumbai with a cost nearing 2 billion dollars."

It's good to be king.

[found via Guy Kawasaki's Twitter feed]

It's amazingly easy to add speech synthesis to WPF applications.

WPF's speech synthesis capabilities are often lost in the rich feature set of the platform.

Last year, I wrote a blog post about Speech Synthesis in WPF.

I thought it would be cool to write an Extension Method that encapsulates speech synthesis functionality, so that speaking would be as simple as

   1: string sayThis;

   2: sayThis.Speak();

The code to make this possible is this simple.

   1: public static void Speak (this string text)

   2: {

   3:     SpeechSynthesizer synthesizer = new SpeechSynthesizer();

   4:  

   5:     synthesizer.SpeakAsync(text);

   6: }

Be sure to add a reference to System.Speech and add the appropriate using statement.

   1: using System.Speech.Synthesis;

Now if only Speech Synthesis existed in Silverlight. ;)

What if 24 took place in 1994?

This YouTube video definitively answers that question:

[hat tip to Scott Lock for sending this my way]