Tales from the Smart Client

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...

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...

In my history of Sparkle I mentioned I had worked on ToolBook. That solicited this comment: Asymetrix's ToolBook? Wow, that was so ahead of its time! Just make sure Sparkle runs faster! :P Sorry, could not resist. I am sure Sparkle will rock....

I mentioned last week I was expecting a checkin that would transform the performance of Sparkle's timeline. The issue was simple: we create a row in the timeline for every element in the scene, then create more rows for each property that is animated...

When I presented Model/View/ViewModel at the PDC I was a little worried that I would get tackled by some Patterns expert who would want to debate the relative merits of MVC, or my interpretation thereof. To head off this encounter, I practiced saying...

A friend pointed me to this great article about MVC: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhatsaControllerAnyway The central claim is that MVC had a very clear definition in SmallTalk, which was changed by either NextSTEP or Ivar Jacobsen depending whom you talk...

CollectionView is a very interesting construct. After including it in my ViewModel I meant to quickly blog about the usage...but when I started thinking about it and reading a bit more about it, it becomes even more interesting. Lots of good blogging...

I've had several questions about when and why to use M-V-VM versus other approaches. The obvious purpose is abstraction of the View, reducing the amount of business logic or glue code stuck in code-behind. All tasty goodness abstractly, but here's another...

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...

New Expression build will be available "soon". I've been working on the Feb CTP bits for awhile, and its a great build...faster, fewer bugs, much closer to the final deliverables. h ttp://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F51C4D96-9AEA...

In preparing my example of Model-View-ViewModel I had a lot of help from Adrian Sanchez, who previewed the code and asked me questions about it. It was a big help in figuring out what needed explanation. When I started on Expression I heard about the...

I got e-mail from an interested party pointing me to Martin Fowler's description of the PresentationModel pattern. Written up just last year, I hadn't seen it in the literature before. I've got to read it a couple of times and think about the subtleties...

I'm a big Fowler fan, his "Refactoring" book is one of my all-time favorites, and I used to read his site religiously (somehow it fell off my feed list, you can bet it is going back on). Anyway, I'm sorry I missed his post last year on PresentationModel...

I turned on "comment approval" a while back and used to get e-mails telling me comments were waiting. Apparently my Spam filter was eating them, so I apologize to Daniel who posted several notes, in particular this one: John, Mano...

Now it can be told...I am a developer on Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer aka "Sparkle". We finally announced the product at PDC last week and I gave a presentation on how we built the product. I promised the attendees I would blog the content...

Pablo is one the most senior people on the WPF team and has been a key decision maker in deciding what scenarios WPF would address. http://www.fernicola.org/loquitor/index.php?/archives/19-When-to-use-WPF-and-when-to-use-other-technologies.html...

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...

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

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

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...

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,66460-2,00.html I would like to disclose that I own an iPod and iMac in addition to an XBox, 3 PCs, a Subaru Forester and a new Siemens dishwasher. Of course, I *tried* to buy a Microsoft-branded dishwasher...but no...

Basically use JavaScript to fetch XML data from a web page and cut down the roundtrip. http://adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php

I'm afraid this is going to turn into a Monty Python-esque spiral ending with "...and then boss murdered us in cold blood and danced around our graves until sunrise", but following on Rory and Chris , I gotta tell about my two worst jobs: 1) Like Rory...

I took a slightly different tack than Chris on embedding Python into Script . I created an attached property, with the idea that I could set a piece of script "on" an element, giving it some scope. For example, I got this to work: < Button Name...

I've been reading Nikhil's series on data bound controls in ASP.NET. It is an interesting compare and contrast exercise with what Avalon provides, as well as just plain interesting: Four parts so far...first is here: http://www.nikhilk.net/DataSourceControlBasics...