One thing I’d like to play with is extending Outlook through add-ins with C#. It’ll be a good opportunity to learn more about .NET development and the Windows tools. Plus, I can “fix” some of the things that annoy me about Outlook...

I thought I should add a post with the full list of posts in the D-V-VM pattern. They are: DataModel-View-ViewModel pattern: 1 (overview) DataModel-View-ViewModel pattern: 2 (first implementation of DataModel class) DM-V-VM part 3: A sample DataModel...

John Gossman has blogged several times about the M-V-VM pattern for developing WPF applications. We've been using a similar pattern on the Max team, with slightly different terminology (DataModel instead of ViewModel). I thought I'd do a series of posts...

Apple has posted an SDK for accessing iTunes using COM on Windows (it's funny, I noticed they left .DS_Store files in the zip archive!). It includes sample javascripts for doing things like creating playlists. You can actually write these scripts without...

In part 1 , I gave an overview of a pattern we use in the UI development of Max . In this post, I plan to talk about DataModels. In part 1, I wrote: DataModel DataModel is responsible for exposing data in a way that is easily consumable by WPF. All of...

Displaying large sets of data can be challenging to do performantly. If you have a scrolling list of data, one technique to improve performance is to only create the UI elements that are visible. This is refered to as UI virtualization (as opposed to...

In part 2 , I showed a base class for DataModels. In this post, I will describe a sample implementation. For this sample, I'll use a DataModel that represents a stock. The model will be in charge of asynchronously fetching the stock quote and making it...

Ok, time to wrap this up :-) Now, we'll finally build what I'm calling a view model for managing a portfolio of stocks (building on the StockModel example from previous posts). A view model is a class that will be used as the DataContext for a data...

Speaking of auto complete , I got my first patent! It's some email address autocomplete stuff from my MacOE days. You can read it here if you have nothing better to do.

In the previous posts, I've covered data models and how to make data easily consumable by Avalon. Now, I want to start getting into the view model side of things because I don't think it's clear what I mean by them and I'm working up to an example. I...

In part 5 , I talked about commands and how they are used for behavior. Now, I want to talk about a better way to encapsulate them. First, I'll create a CommandModel class that encapsulates the RoutedCommand and the enabled/execute code. This is all pretty...

In part 1 of this series of posts, I gave an overview of how to write a VirtualizingPanel. One of the keys to the implementation is understanding IItemContainerGenerator. I personally found it a bit nonintuitive to begin with. IItemContainerGenerator...

I was a little confused about the difference between <%= expression %> and <%# expression %> in ASP.NET. It seems like both work in a lot of cases, but in other cases, only the # (data binding) version works. So, I decided to dig into it a...

Sorry it's taking me so long to get the posts out. The series turned out to be a little longer than I anticipated :-) I got a lot of good feedback on the Data Model stuff. First off, I want to mention layering. The DataModel typically is a layer on top...

In part 3 , I showed code for StockModel, a DataModel for stocks. On the Max team, we are big believers in extensive unit testing of our code. It took some time to learn the best way to test some of the WPF related stuff. In this post, I intend to demonstrate...

Long ago I complained about cmd.exe. At the time, I tried out some of the replacements and didn't find anything I liked. But, I just tried out a Console 2.0 beta, and I love it! The way it hosts cmd.exe is necessarily a bit of a hack, but they pull it...

Ok, we finally get to a full implementation with this post. I’ll be showing the implementation of a VirtualizingTilePanel. This is a layout is very similar to the one I used for the layout animation sample . For the sample, I’ve created a small test harness...

Sometimes you want to attach some behavior to an Avalon element by adding some event handlers, but without subclassing the element. An example of this is my most recent version of the layout animation code. In my original post , I had code in my code...

A fairly common question that comes up in mailing lists and other forums is “Why doesn’t Entourage use the Apple address book?” I’ll give you my take on that here. As a disclaimer, I want to make sure it’s clear that this...

Now that we understand how IItemContainerGenerator works, I’m going to walk through some of the details of how your virtualizing panel’s MeasureOverride should work. I think the easiest way to see how it all works is to just look at some code. In the...

This one took a little getting used to when switching from the Macintosh to Windows. On unix (including Mac OS X shells) wildcard expansion is done by the shell, and then the expanded list of files is passed on to the program being run. On Windows, the...

There's been lots of discussion following the release of Windows Media Player 10 regarding choice. It's a bit complicated because there are so many axes of choice, and so many things to pivot around. I'll try to summarize some of the issues here. iPod...

This post continues my series on layout to layout animations in WCP (Avalon). In part 1 , I showed to create a panel that lays out its children in a grid and allows the child size to be controlled with a slider through data binding. In this post, I'll...

If you’ve been following my and Omar’s blogs lately, you’ll know that we’ve been learning a lot about writing managed Outlook COM Add-ins and running into lots of complications in the process. Here I describe how a shim can help...

I've been using cmd.exe more and more lately, and it's driving me crazy! I was spoiled for years with Apple's Terminal.app without even knowning it. It just seemed like the way a command line environment should work on a modern operating system. It's...