Tales from the Smart Client

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd419663.aspx

I think we have conflated several concepts with RoutedCommands: 1) The ICommand part with it's Execute/CanExecute methods ... basically this is just a form of method dispatch that lends itself to declarative systems 2) Common Verbs or Actions -...

I'm often asked about the Expression architecture, but have never found the time to really describe the whole thing. Now Paul Stovell has dug into how it works using Reflector and compares it to Composite WPF (Prism). Some of what he sees is a case of...

My one lifelong hobby is reading. My house is full of bookcases and my floors are covered with books that don't fit. I read a lot of non-fiction: history, science, philosophy. I always tell people I haven't read sci-fi since my early 20s, which really...

As I’ve described before , we introduced the new VisualStateManager concept into Silverlight WPF before we added the same functionality in desktop WPF, in violation of our general guideline that Silverlight is functionally a subset of the desktop .NET...

I was reading a thread about Commands in the WPF Disciples group and noticed a comment about being unable to initialize an attached property where the type was collection. The problem was unless you put in an explicit Collection object tag, the property...

From Dave Relyea's blog, Pixel Snapping in Silverlight as an attached behavior: http://blogs.msdn.com/devdave/archive/2008/06/22/Using-an-Attached-DependencyProperty-to-Implement-Pixel-Snapping-as-an-Attached-Behavior.aspx

Recently , I talked about how templates in WPF/SL are fundamentally built around the concept of a state machine, where the condition is a Trigger (desktop WPF) or code (Silverlight) and the new state is a group of Setters (desktop WPF) or a Storyboard...

Julian Dominguez is writing a series about the PresentationModel pattern and using it with WPF. http://staff.southworks.net/blogs/jdominguez/archive/2008/05/20/First-approach-to-Presentation-Model-with-DataTemplates.aspx and Glenn Block has just posted...

The Silverlight and desktop WPF implementations of Templates use the same syntax and programming model for describing the tree of objects that make up the control body, but differ in how they describe dynamic changes of the template. In desktop WPF, this...

A few months ago I was interviewed by Craig Shoemaker of Pixel8 about my experiences with Expression and WPF. The podcast is up now at: http://pixel8.infragistics.com/shows/gossman

http://blogs.msdn.com/ivo_manolov/archive/2008/05/20/8526007.aspx

The ClickBehavior is about the simplest I can think of. For illustration purposes I only included one command, but LeftClickCommand, DoubleClickCommand, MouseOverCommand etc. are all obvious extensions: public static class ClickBehavior { public...

Scott's blog has an extensive list of the new stuff: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/05/12/visual-studio-2008-and-net-framework-3-5-service-pack-1-beta.aspx If you scroll down about half way, you'll find the WPF features: better startup...

My favorite feature of WPF (desktop and web versions) is attached properties. It would be good enough if attached properties merely enabled things like keeping layout properties (Canvas.Left) organized by the type of container rather than the type of...

I am an architect of WPF, both the full desktop version and the subset that provides the UI framework for Silverlight. This subsetting exercise raises challenges I've not run into before when designing software. Simply put, how do we keep the framework...

I spent a quite a bit of time late in Blend tracking down memory leaks. Jossef has written the article I wish I had read then: http://blogs.msdn.com/jgoldb/archive/2008/02/04/finding-memory-leaks-in-wpf-based-applications.aspx

There have been a raft of interesting articles and discussions of MVC patterns and WPF. A practical introduction is here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/MVCtoUnitTestinWPF.aspx I love the article, but must add I have always struggled with RoutedCommands...

We recently shipped Expression Blend, the product I had been working on for the last few years. I love the product and the team, but it was the longest project I've ever worked on, and I was offered a great new opportunity: to work on WPF, both the desktop...

Kiran just posted the definitive stuff on WPF perf. Get it h ere

C# and the .NET frameworks allow you to be incredibly productive and write elegant, maintainable code. However, some of these productivity features can just make you productive at writing slow code. “Sparkle” has an internal DOM for working with XAML...

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...

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...

I've been talking to a lot of people internally and externally about performance, and have observed something very interesting: while people run the debugger over their code every day, stepping through the code to see if it works even when they don't...

Conceptually there isn't much to M-V-VM that can be expressed in UML...but if the GoF authors can use UML to describe Singleton (one object), I guess can make a 4 box UML diagram for M-V-VM.