Articles



  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  Barak's Blog about Silverlight and beyond  on  Dec 05, 2006 (more than a year ago)   /   original article

    Just a quick note to remind you that "WPF/E" is indeed a cross platform presentation technology. Look at the screenshots of the http://channel9.msdn.com/playground/wpfe/Sprawl/default.html samples on Firefox, Mac and IE7 (yes it also works also on IE6)

    MacOS Safari

    FireFox 2.0

    IE7 on Windows Vista

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  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  Barak's Blog about Silverlight and beyond  on  Dec 02, 2006 (more than a year ago)   /   original article

    Hello readers.

    My name is Barak Cohen and I am the Product Manager of "WPF/E" (codename). I have been in Microsoft for 5 years (wow) and am excited to have the opportunity to work on something that will have such an impact on Microsoft's customers in addition to many other connected people.

    I used to be a Windows device driver developer in the past (can you belive that) and also was involved in other Microsoft runtimes such the the .NET Framework and the .NET Compact Framework. I have so much to tell you about "WFP/E" but I will keep this to my next post.

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  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  Adrian Vinca's blog  on  Nov 29, 2006 (more than a year ago)   /   original article

    Some time ago, Peter Blois posted "Snoop", a tool which I find really useful for debugging WPF applications. It allows you to:

  • Browse the visual tree of running WPF applications
  • Inspect properties of elements at runtime
  • Edit properties of elements at runtime
  • Inspect RoutedEvents that are occurring, including the elements that handle them
  • Magnify sections of the UI
  • Find and debug binding errors

    • Snoop screenshot

    You may find more info and downloads on the Snoop official web page:

    http://www.blois.us/Snoop/

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  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  Tales from the Smart Client  on  Nov 04, 2006 (more than a year ago)   /   original article
    Kiran just posted the definitive stuff on WPF perf.  Get it here
  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  house of mirrors  on  Sep 15, 2006 (more than a year ago)   /   original article
    Styled Tooltips



    It took me a while to realize it, but in WPF you can even style the tooltips! It's actually pretty cool, I just wonder why the default style is the same old boring yellow rectangle.

    I decided it'd be super cool to have bubble quotes instead. Now if only I could convince the Vista folks on this as well :)

    My 10 minute hacked version:


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  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  Tales from the Smart Client  on  Sep 06, 2006 (more than a year ago)   /   original article

    During the past year, we’ve found and fixed a lot of perf issues in Expression and WPF.  I’d like to relate a few of them, not so much because you’ll have the exact same problems, but that the pattern of finding and resolving the bugs may be helpful experiences.  To start:

     

    Expression uses a tree data structure to keep track of the XAML source code.  Each node in the tree has a property called Children that returns a List of all its child nodes. For leaf nodes this collection was always empty, but even so a new collection object was always allocated. In some scenarios, this resulted in megabytes of allocations.  To fix this, we implemented a singleton EmptyList class.  Leaf nodes always return the same instance of this collection, removing all the allocation costs.

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  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  house of mirrors  on  Aug 22, 2006 (more than a year ago)   /   original article
    Long time since my last post, but don't worry- I haven't been idle.

    My latest little project is Snoop, a Spy++ like utility for WPF applications, but cooler.

    Documentation
    Download

    • Browse the visual tree of running WPF applications.
    • Inspect properties of elements at runtime.
    • Edit properties of elements at runtime.
    • Inspect RoutedEvents that are occurring, including the elements that handle them.
    • Magnify sections of the UI.
    • Find and debug binding errors.

    My favorite part of Snoop is that it can even be run on the latest releases of Sparkle- if you're curious how Sparkle is put together, snoop it!

    It's essentially a set of utilities that I found useful while developing and debugging Sparkle, the feedback from the rest of the Sparkle developers has been quite positive so I'm hoping other WPF developers will find it useful as well.
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  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  Tales from the Smart Client  on  Aug 22, 2006 (more than a year ago)   /   original article

    My colleague Pete has it up on his site:  http://www.blois.us/Snoop/

    This developed out of internal tools originally built into Expression that help us inspect our visual tree.  Originally we dumped the tree to a text file, then Pete put some UI on it, then Kenny incorporated the UI into Expression, and since then Pete has raised the stakes repeatedly making it standalone and adding features such as being able to inspect and even set values in the tree, and to be able to set breakpoints on data changes. 

    Yes, you can debug databinding in WPF using Snoop.

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  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  house of mirrors  on  Aug 21, 2006 (more than a year ago)   /   original article
    I've been on an 'animate everything' kick lately, my first target was dialogs. With the new transparent windows in the July CTP, WPF makes it extremely easy to animate the opening and closing of the dialog windows.

    I modeled my dialog effect on the popular web technique 'lightbox' (aka greybox), a simple example of which is Lightbox JS, but it should be quite simple to custom tailor your own dialog.

    The cool thing here is that the dialog is a real modal dialog, not just another element at the top of the visual tree.
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  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  AdamU's WebLog  on  Jul 05, 2006 (more than a year ago)   /   original article

    Two weeks ago, I spent an entire week at a customer site. This customer is in Raleigh, NC, and I got to see their early progress on a WPF prototype. They see the User Experience opportunities with WPF as a key differentiator in their market.

    This opportunity came about because of a program that the Server and Tools Business within Microsoft runs, called Frontline. This program is why I spent the week with our Customer Support organization in April in Texas.

    We always try to look for win win situations. In the Frontline case, I think that this program is a true win-win.

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