Adam Nathan's Blog : WPF

Petzold strikes again!

Adam Nathan — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:11:00 GMT

(Or, rather, struck again last summer.) I just found Jeff's post about receiving a book from Petzold complete with witty comments. I was also a lucky recipient of an autographed book, so I thought I'd share what Petzold had to say to me:

Funny stuff! (He's referring to this discussion, in case you missed it.) I haven't had a chance to read the book, but it looks really good. To say "thank you," I've been meaning to send him a signed copy of Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed, but I haven't been able to come up with something witty enough to say. "No third dimension, alas, but plenty of color?"

Today's ego boosts

Adam Nathan — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:46:00 GMT

PC World has just named Popfly one of the "25 Most Innovative Products of the Year"

WPF Unleashed has just been nominated for a 2007 Jolt Product Excellence Award, which recognizes "the most innovative, trend-making, ahead-of-the-curve products"

Obviously I'm really pleased and grateful about both of these developments, as both of these products have been a labor of love. It feels like so little time has passed since Popfly was a team of two, and now we've got a nice-sized talented team (small by Microsoft's standards, of course) running full steam ahead. And again I need to give credit to Neil Rowe at SAMS for the way we used color in WPF Unleashed, which no doubt is the most "innovative and trend-making" aspect of the book. I work with some great people (and for a great company), which enables recognition like this to happen.

My wife is concerned that my head is no longer going to fit through the door. :) It's too bad that when I do something differently than the way she expects it, she uses a different word than "innovative."

The WPF Challenge

Adam Nathan — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 18:05:00 GMT

Check it out. From the man who thinks I use too many exclamation points! (It's true. I like exclamation points and parentheses!)

WPF Unleashed is flying off the shelves... even the shelf in my office!

Adam Nathan — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 18:15:00 GMT

I suppose I should be flattered. It seems that someone swiped my copy of WPF Unleashed out of my office last week! (Nothing else appears to be missing.) It does have a few identifying marks on it, so the perpetrator better be careful!

At any rate, thanks again to those folks who have given glowing reviews at Amazon and on various blogs (I've seen this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, which Babel Fish helped me translate). It means a lot to me.

Next up, getting the samples translated to VB...

WPF Unleashed is now available!

Adam Nathan — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 00:08:00 GMT

I got my hands on two copies while on vacation and gave them to family members, but now that I'm back home I need to wait for the rest of my copies to arrive. I snooped around the blogosphere and found two references to it:

Adam Nathan's new WPF book is awesome!

WPF Unleashed - New Book from Sams Publishing

Thanks for the nice comments!

WPF Unleashed: The perfect stocking stuffer!

Adam Nathan — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 17:21:00 GMT

This weekend I entered the final phase of tweaking and reviewing, so WPF Unleashed is on the verge of being printed! The book is now scheduled to be available right before the new year (December 27, according to Amazon). Although this isn't quite in time for most of the upcoming holidays, perhaps you now know what to do with any Amazon gift certificates or cash you might receive! Or maybe I should have changed the title of this post to "Reading WPF Unleashed: A New Year's resolution you can actually accomplish!"

There are two things that I'm really excited about that I haven't mentioned before:

It's got an in-depth chapter on 3D by none other than Daniel Lehenbauer, the guy who implemented WPF 3D!
The entire book is printed in full color! Not only does this mean stunning figures, but the C# and XAML (and some C++) has syntax coloring just like in Visual Studio!

Although I like to think that the content is top-notch, if nothing else the book is bound to be the most beautiful .NET book around! I've been really impressed with how well the publishing team has been putting it together. I did a lot of things that made it difficult to produce: the coloring, callouts within figures, callouts within code listings, intricate diagrams, four kinds of sidebars, and so on. It's caused plenty of headaches and late nights, but I think readers will greatly benefit from this extra effort. Below are a few random snapshots of pages (or parts of pages) to whet your appetite...

WPF Unleashed!

Adam Nathan — Wed, 17 May 2006 17:30:00 GMT

It's official... my WPF book now has a title, a temporary cover, and is listed on Amazon:

The details aren't published yet, but this book will have a feature that I think is quite cool... and I've never seen it done in any other book. So stay tuned!

I was surprised to read that it will be available on September 19th and that it's 576 pages long! Considering that I still need to write about 40% of it, I'm a bit skeptical about those details...

It's also listed as a "networking" book. Hmmm...

Aero Glass inside a WPF Window

Adam Nathan — Thu, 04 May 2006 17:30:00 GMT

Recently Tim shared some code for extending Windows Vista Aero "Glass" inside a Windows Forms window. It sounds like he's eventually planning on showing this with WPF (among other things). I also looked into this for my upcoming WPF book, and I couldn't wait to share the results of my little WPF glass experiment! Sorry, Tim, if I'm stealing your thunder!

NOTE: This code will require WPF Beta 2 or later (and Windows Vista). I'll share the whole project (including an updated Internet Hearts app) when Beta 2 is released.

I took the WPF UI I created for the Internet Hearts migration, slapped it in a System.Windows.Window, and "glassified" it. Here is the result:

I didn't change a thing in the Hearts UI, and everything worked as expected: the 2D & 3D animations, the elements that already had partial opacity (like the card table), etc.

And when doing a "Flip 3D" (which I'm surprisingly finding more useful than the standard Alt+Tab), the result is pretty cool:

Of course, I'm now breaking all sorts of style, usability, and performance guidelines by my overzealous use of glass, but it's still an interesting exercise!

All it took was this function, which extends the glass frame into the client area of any WPF Window based on the passed-in margin:

public class GlassHelper
{
public static bool ExtendGlassFrame(Window window, Thickness margin)
{
if (!DwmIsCompositionEnabled())
return false;

IntPtr hwnd = new WindowInteropHelper(window).Handle;
if (hwnd == IntPtr.Zero)
throw new InvalidOperationException("The Window must be shown before extending glass.");

// Set the background to transparent from both the WPF and Win32 perspectives
window.Background = Brushes.Transparent;
HwndSource.FromHwnd(hwnd).CompositionTarget.BackgroundColor = Colors.Transparent;

MARGINS margins = new MARGINS(margin);
DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea(hwnd, ref margins);
return true;
}
}

We need the HWND of the Window to pass to DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea, and WindowInteropHelper enables us to get it. The MARGINS structure controls how much to extend the glass on each of the four sides. To get the "sheet of glass" effect, you can pass -1 for all four sides.

The trickiest thing is knowing to set not only Window's Background to Transparent, but also the BackgroundColor of the corresponding HwndSource's CompositionTarget (which is set to black by default).

The MARGINS structure passed to DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea is similar in spirit to WPF's Thickness type, so I chose to expose Thickness from ExtendGlassFrame and defined MARGINS with a constructor that does the conversion:

struct MARGINS
{
public MARGINS(Thickness t)
{
    Left = (int)t.Left;
    Right = (int)t.Right;
    Top = (int)t.Top;
    Bottom = (int)t.Bottom;
}
public int Left;
public int Right;
public int Top;
public int Bottom;
}

The two DWM APIs are defined as follows:

[DllImport("dwmapi.dll", PreserveSig=false)]
static extern void DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea(IntPtr hwnd, ref MARGINS margins);

[DllImport("dwmapi.dll", PreserveSig=false)]
static extern bool DwmIsCompositionEnabled();

Finally, the Window calls ExtendGlassFrame inside OnSourceInitialized:

protected override void OnSourceInitialized(EventArgs e)
{
base.OnSourceInitialized(e);
// This can't be done any earlier than the SourceInitialized event:
GlassHelper.ExtendGlassFrame(this, new Thickness(-1));
}

Note that with Thickness I can pass a single value (-1) that will be used for all four MARGIN fields.

I'm going to add dwmapi.dll (and other Windows Vista DLLs) to pinvoke.net so folks can start sharing managed signatures for new APIs such as this. Enjoy!

WPF Book Update (and SD West 2006)

Adam Nathan — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 17:15:00 GMT

Long time no blog, but I’ve got a good excuse. Since my last post, I’ve become a father! This event, of course, made me seriously doubt (even more than usual) the wisdom of writing another book. Here's a quote from my wife:

“You wrote a book during our first year of marriage. You’re writing a book during your first year of fatherhood. Are there any more firsts you can ruin?”

For some reason, explaining that I can’t control the timing of ground-breaking Microsoft technologies didn’t help my case!

I almost called it quits, but I’m once again writing (every night from 9 to midnight, while my son is sleeping) and actually making good progress. I started in November, and now I’m about half-way done (with the first draft, anyway)! I’m really excited about the book, but it’s still too early to give specifics. So stay tuned.

In other news, right now I’m flying down to Santa Clara to speak about C++ & WinFX at SD West 2006. Maybe I’ll see you there!

The passing of one book and the birth of another

Adam Nathan — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 18:15:00 GMT

It's official... I got a letter informing me that .NET and COM, almost four years after its release, is out of print. Of course, it still lives on in PDF form. Like Luke, I've sometimes been baffled by the apparent lack of supply. I've been told many times about someone that wanted to get a copy of it but wasn't able to. But I figure if supply/demand was really out of whack then I would have heard about an Xbox 360-style bidding frenzy on eBay!

After finishing .NET and COM, I said I would never write another book. At the same time, I knew that as the years passed I would start forgetting about how bad the process really was and only remember the good things. I really appreciate the kind words from many folks via e-mail, in person, on this blog, and on sites like Amazon. The amount of positive feedback I've received has been overwhelming, making it even easier to forget about the enormous amount of work and sacrifices it took to create the book! (Although I did save a particularly nasty voicemail where I got chewed out for being waaaaaaay past a number of deadlines.)

Besides the fading of bad memories, something else happened this year. My job led me to a fantastic new technology that I feel really passionate about. Therefore, I have given into temptation and decided to write a book about my new favorite technology: WPF!

Stay tuned for more info...

WPF developer/designer cooperation in action!

Adam Nathan — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 20:37:00 GMT

Nate Dunlap is an awesome designer. Check out what he did with the Windows Media Player Visualization project I posted last week. Now, I'm guessing he has more programming skills than your average designer, but I love seeing a design go (essentially) straight from Sparkle to being live and animating inside Windows Media Player.

Using COM Interop to Create a WPF Visualization for Windows Media Player

Adam Nathan — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 17:15:00 GMT

It had been awhile since I've given a talk on COM Interop & PInvoke, but last week I did just that for a developer lab in Redmond. For this, I dug up my old ".NET Visualization for Windows Media Player" example, which uses C#, COM Interop, and some APIs in System.Drawing (in other words, Windows Forms). Of course, this compelled me to update it with WPF! So I used Karsten's ScreenSpaceLines3D sample and simply made the height of the pyramid dependent on the current audio's frequency, making it feel "alive." Here's the source code (compatible with the September CTP) and here's the result:

You can see that the XAML is quite simple (and doesn't need anything special for Windows Media Player integration):

So what needs to be done in the code-behind to make this work?

Make your class implement the IWMPEffects COM interface. I manually defined this interface in C# based on the IDL definition in the Media Player SDK.
Mark your class as ComVisible(true), since by default assemblies in WPF projects are marked ComVisible(false).
Register your DLL so Windows Media Player will find it. This involves adding some keys under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Objects\Effects.

Although IWMPEffects has several members, the most important one is Render. Windows Media Player calls your Render method regularly, giving you data about the audio, a handle to the device context (HDC) on which you need to draw, and a rectangle defining the bounds. Since WPF supports interoperability with HWNDs, I first needed to get an HWND from the HDC by PInvoking to WindowFromDC. From there, I could set my UserControl as the RootVisual for the HwndSource and update the UI appropriately. I think the obvious next step is to use data binding, but for now I've left that as an exercise for the reader. :)

Although self-registering code is a no-no, I gave the class custom registration & unregistration functions so all you need to do is run "REGASM /codebase AvalonControlLibrary1.dll" after building to see the results inside Windows Media Player. Enjoy!

XAML Video Playing Cards

Adam Nathan — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 20:29:00 GMT

On XAMLshare I just put the source for the video playing cards I showed in my PDC talk and on the Channel 9 video:

Put the XAML inside XAMLPad (Beta 1) and qualify the .wmv references with their full path. Enjoy!

Tags: PDC, PDC05

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

Announcing www.winfxhearts.com!

Adam Nathan — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 17:30:00 GMT

To correspond with my PDC talk about making an application "light up" on Windows Vista, I've created www.winfxhearts.com. This site has a ClickOnce link that enables you can play a version of my new & improved Internet Hearts game. Here's a "before & after" look:

This is still the good ol' Win32 application, but with a dramatically different user experience thanks to WPF and ClickOnce. In the screenshot above, the reddish part of the new UI uses WPF (Avalon), but the chat window, menus, etc. are still Win32. And of course the game logic is still the same. There's no need to rewrite it!

Again, I promise to blog more details after the PDC (and not just about Avalon & ClickOnce, but Indigo, Windows Vista, plus the experiences of upgrading to VC8 & using /CLR). In the meantime, go ahead and try the game, or look for the Channel 9 video about WinFX Hearts & WPF (scheduled to appear on Monday).

You can play this version on Windows Vista Beta 1, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003, as long as WinFX Beta 1 is installed (and a post-Beta 2 version of the .NET Framework is not installed). If you're going to PDC05, you can play the game on machines in the "Windows Vista Test Drive" Commnet area through Tuesday (9/13).

Sure, it's not as popular a game as Solitaire or Spider Solitaire, but hopefully the opportunity to play humans is an incentive. Before entering a game, you get to choose a name and a picture (either a standard one or any image on the web!):

The game doesn't begin until four players have joined, so you might have to wait awhile to play (or convince some friends to join at the same time)!

Post any questions/issues/comments here. Enjoy!