Adam Nathan's Blog : WCF

Light up on Windows Vista: The "Top 10" List

Adam Nathan — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 08:42:00 GMT

PDC attendees got a "top 10" poster, but the details are now live on MSDN: "10 things you can do to make your application shine when it runs on Windows Vista." They are, in no particular order:

1. Follow the Windows Vista style guidelines
2. Enrich the user experience
3. Enable users to visualize, organize, and search
4. Run securely
5. Design for reliability and manageability
6. Establish a customer feedback loop
7. Build for connected systems
8. Bring data to the user with RSS
9. Make document data accessible
10. Build for mobility

This helps frame my talk on Thursday (FUN318), since I'll be digging into 6 out of these 10 themes and show how I applied them to Internet Hearts. I won't be covering #1 because that's not very exciting, or #3 and #9 because they don't apply to this application, or #10 (which would have been nice) because that's too much to cram into one hour.

As a side note, "Light Up on Longhorn" had a much better ring than "Light Up on Windows Vista." Does anyone have a better term for "light up"?

Tags: PDC, PDC05

Internet Hearts: 112,000 Lines of Code

Adam Nathan — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 23:39:00 GMT

On Monday I asked for guesses on the size of the Internet Hearts source base, and the highest (public) one was 45,000 lines of code. The answer: approximately 112,000 lines of code! 51,000 are client-specific, 35,000 are server-specific, and 26,000 are shared by both.

Higher than you expected? Well, there's a lot of functionality on the server end. And the application is actually a general-purpose game client & server designed to support multiple games (Internet Backgammon/Checkers/Hearts/Reversi/Spades). For the purpose of turning this app into a shareable sample, I've already removed the non-Hearts pieces, but the generic nature of the architecture definitely contributes to the code size.

When I apply today's technologies to this older code base, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to "do more with less": Less lines of code, less time & effort, less bugs, etc. So we should see the application shrink.

Here are some diagrams to illustrate how the baseline Internet Hearts application is structured (prior to any improvements). The orange-colored components involve UI, so they're candidates for an Avalon makeover. The indigo-colored components involve networking, so they're candidates for... you guessed it... Indigo!

The Client:

The Server:

Now available: Beta 1 RC of Avalon and Indigo

Adam Nathan — Tue, 24 May 2005 03:09:00 GMT

I'm happy to say that the Beta 1 RC of Avalon & Indigo is now available here. This version is compatible with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2!

As promised, I've updated my XAML playing cards sample here, and I've updated the two pages on XAMLshare as well. I see that Valentin already updated his chess sample on XAMLshare to match Beta 1 RC! Great!

Next time, we'll look at some of the Avalon changes from March CTP to Beta 1 RC.

Migrating Internet Hearts to WinFX

Adam Nathan — Tue, 03 May 2005 09:59:00 GMT

Last year, Chris Sells wrote a series of articles in which he set out to rewrite Solitaire using Avalon. The lack of scaling graphics in the Win32 version (and lack of access to its source code, I suppose) forced him down the road of rewriting the app from scratch. Plus, the point was to explore "the initial decisions developers will make when building new applications targeting Longhorn." (This was before WinFX got decoupled from Longhorn and made available for Windows XP & Windows Server 2003.)

This year, I'm going to create a new WinFX-enabled version of Internet Hearts (the not-as-popular card game that also ships with Windows XP). But the focus is going to be on migration rather than starting from scratch. I'll gradually replace the UI with Avalon and the communication with Indigo. After all, I want to focus on the cool stuff; not rewriting the basic logic. I'll share results as I go along, and hopefully I'll be able to share the source code, pre-migration and post-migration!

I want to give special thanks to Steven Goulet (one of the folks on my new team), who came up with Internet Hearts as a great example application that could benefit from Avalon & Indigo. He also did the legwork of getting permission for the original source code. So without him, this would not be possible!