Tales from the Smart Client

With the code below I could host an Avalon TextBox in my application, type Python expressions and see the results. What I still could not do (when I first finished the code) was execute code back in my application. I needed to give the Python code an...

All this web stuff is just soooooo... confusing.

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...

For obvious PR-ish reasons, Microsoft encourages employees to have public blogs. For obvious ego-ish reasons, a ton of Microsoft employees have taken the company up on the deal. I had a personal blog 3 years ago before I left Visio, at a time when it...

Within 15 minutes of my last post, Bob pointed out that the purpose of Wiki Spam is to increase the Page Rank of their sites. So, I understand the business model now, I just don't get the ethics... Bob by the way, has an interesting looking site.

Chris mentions just using ValueConverters to adapt the Model to the View instead of this complex Model/View/ViewModel stuff. I should have made it clear, the ViewModel contains ValueConverters. If you can implement you UI using a set of ValueConverters...

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...

About time

Came across the AWS blog coverage of the Amazon Developer's Conference . It's a very different business from what I do, but I love the speaker list and the discussions.

As much as I would enjoy tooling around Redmond on a bulldozer , I think it is fair to say Microsoft's growth potential is limited by our ability to find great candidates, in particular ones happy to endure our rainy winter months. If Microsoft wants...

CNET has a lengthy piece on Ajax responding to the WSJ article. I agree with David Temkin: "The successors to Word and Excel and Powerpoint are not going to be written this way. It's just not going to happen."

Miguel has a list of concerns with the Avalon architecture. I'll start with the easy ones: Canvas model: Avalon's canvas model suffers from the same problem every other retained system suffers: they are hard to scale in the general case. I worked on AutoCAD...

If you haven't seen the Incredibles you may not get it. If you have, be sure to stick through the credits and hear the Flash Song. FlashAndSparkle

My colleague Amir Khella is experimenting with the Avalon Grid control, using it to provide FishEye effects quite unlike anything you'd expect from a mere layout container: http://www.elementsofpassion.com/archives/2005/07/playing_around http:/...

Looking at the last point on its own grounds, you may think: "Okay, you can program Avalon in Python. So what? I'm a C#/VB/C++ programmer...I need to learn Python why??" The reason Pythalon is so fun is that it is interactive. The programs in the previous...

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

Daniel tells the tale: http://blogs.msdn.com/danlehen/archive/2005/10/09/478923.aspx

When my colleague Joe Marini was slashdotted a few months ago, I remember a post from the peanut gallery about how Joe should switch to an open source server to get better reliability. Hmmm... who would have guessed MozillaWiki was running a crappy commercial...

People have been wondering about the impact of computers for a long time. In terms of previous technological revolutions it initially seemed the computer might be like a power-plant or some kind of factory machine: centrally located, staffed by professionals...

In response to my Ajax rants, Mark Finkel points out browsers can do rich graphics using SVG and VML. Frankly, this is the direction the web needs to head. I am a big fan of these vector graphics formats (my friend Richard See and I launched Visio's SVG...

Looking through some more papers at IdeaBlade, I found ObjectWare references. I briefly did a ObjectWare based prototype project about 10 years ago when ObjectWare was SmallTalk based. Cool technology then, if not exactly mainstream.

Avalon has made an enormous amount of progress in the nearly 3 years I have been working with it. I've had some little projects at work recently, and it is increasingly a pleasure to do them in Avalon...whereas in the past, the stability and incompleteness...

While I'm trying to work around the xml:space issue from my last post, it is worthwhile to see how simple it was to create the attached property (which works fine, as long as your script doesn't need newlines...): namespace Pythalon { using System;...

MS is a big place. It is so big, I really don't know much about the other parts about the company after five years. There is a huge sales and marketing organization, and though I have friends who work there, I don't know much about what they do day-to...

Curious how long before I get comment spam.