After starting my new job in Core OS, it became clear that I would need to brush up on my old COM-programming skills, which I haven’t used in about, oh, eight years. It’s been all .NET Framework since I hired on as a full-time employee at MSFT. A good...

You may recall an earlier post in which I was trying to mate WPF with the Windows Media Player ( Playing with the WMPSDK ). My original thought was to export the time series and spectrum data from WMP to a WPF client app. That didn't work very well...

Now that people have been kicking the tires of the WPF Designer for Visual Studio 2008 (aka "Cider"), we're starting to see a lot of questions about why perfectly good WPF code doesn't load in the designer. Here's a preview of the topic that will ship...

A long time ago, back in the Java days, I wrote some code to simulate a particular kind of autocatalytic chemical reaction. A chaos theory researcher named Vladimir Gontar was doing some interesting work,  adapting cellular automata to more closely...

I’m something of an environmentalist and also a data collector , so I was delighted when Microsoft Hohm announced the availability of a near-realtime power monitor for home use. Even though I participate in Seattle City Light’s Green Power and Green up...

In Part 1 , I described some considerations for implementing a phase-space visualizer. Now I'll dig deeper into the theory and implement the visualizer. The biggest question is how to produce interesting patterns using an input signal with a spread spectrum...

Multithreading support in WPF has been much on my mind lately, especially with my MediaBarrage app. Dwayne Need has a nice discussion of multithreaded UI here . His quick demo is very informative and shows how to compose pieces of UI from different threads...

Since Adam Nathan opened the door to using WPF controls in Windows Media Player, I've been itching to make some neat visualizers. This is something I've wanted to do for years, but the hardware requirements and the amount of effort to get a good payoff...

It occurred to me recently that we haven't documented how to create a WPF project without the Fidalgo project templates. Since most of you probably don't have Fidalgo (aka, "Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for WinFX") installed, it might be rather difficult...

I'm building a little app I call "MediaBarrage," which displays rapid-fire images of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs and associated artwork. In the background, behind a bunch of bewildering animation, I have a slide show which displays all the images in a directory...

Update: Code is posted here . A wonderful thing happened since my last post on this project. The friendly folks at Emotiv listened to their devoted users and opened up the raw electrode data from their amazing EPOC neuroheadset ( just $299 ). That’s a...

Mike Henderlight recently posted a nice summary of a bug in WinFX current (September CTP) bits: ActiveX Controls Not Working via XAML . An attempt to instantiate an ActiveX control with a managed wrapper (Axhost) from XAML fails with an interesting...

I finally got my act together and posted the code for my EmoEngineClientLibrary , which is a C# wrapper around the DotNetEmotivSDK.dll assembly that ships with the Emotiv SDK . Browse the source code Browse the documentation overview You may recall this...

For no obvious reason, I had a sudden need to write a particle system that simulates a Maxwell-Boltzmann gas, which forms the basis for the kinetic theory of gases. The trick is to implement momentum-conserving collisions as the particles bang into each...

Today, Infragistics released the NetAdvantage for WPF toolset, complete with a DataGrid and other custom controls. Really neat stuff. Andrew Flick's blog: http://blogs.infragistics.com/blogs/andrew_flick/archive/2007/04/23/netadvantage-for-wpf-released...

Turns out that it’s a lot simpler than I thought . The most significant barrier to entry is the USB jack. If you buy the Kinect sensor by itself, you’re good to go. But if you buy the XBOX 360 bundle, as I did, then you have a problem. As I understand...

It's like some beautiful dream... We are releasing the source code for .NET Framework base class libraries under the Microsoft Reference License , and the source code will be downloadable and viewable by anyone who accepts the license agreement. In addition...

I've been reading the online draft (pdf) of Ray Pierrehumbert's excellent new book on climate science, Principles of Planetary Climate . On page 54, there's a nice graph of ocean 18 O isotope levels over the past four million years. Using this data, we...

I've had this idea that a neat little WPF project would be to build a toy music visualizer, like the kind in Windows Media Player or the iTunes player. I have a bit of a background in digital signal processing, and this seemed like a fun exercise for...

It’s been over six months since the Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5, June 2008 CTP release, and I’ve been wanting to play around with that stuff for awhile. It’s all shipping in .NET Framework 4.0 and is considered by Soma to be a key cloud...

There's an old tool I've had on my desktop for many years. It was originally called NetMedic, and I think I paid $50 for it back in, oh, about 1997. At some point it was sold, rebranded as VitalAgentIT and given away for free. Then it was built into some...

We've expanded on the success of Joe Stagner’s How-Do-I video series at ASP.NET by posting a bunch of how-do-I videos for WPF . Learn how to build a standard WPF app or how to produce continuous random animation in less than 9 minutes. Also, don't miss...

If you're interested in implementing custom chrome in your WPF application, check out Joe Castro's new post at the WPF SDK blog . Drawing in the non-client with Glass, extending the Glass frame in IE7, and more cool stuff is possible by burrowing under...

Download the code samples . The MSFT P&P folks have come up with some great stuff over the years – I have a particular fondness for the original .NET Framework Application Blocks, which made life so much easier, what with the database access and the...

Download: PDF (17.9 MB) EPUB (37.3 MB) MOBI (69.5 MB) Are you a web developer who wants to get your code into a Windows store app? Kraig Brockschmidt’s excellent new book is for you, at the right price: $0.00. From the introduction: This book is about...