The other day i was looking at some kewl animated websites. Looks good but how useful they are is debatable. Anyway, it gave me an excuse to look at the animation capabilities in Avalon. And guess what!! its a blast. Let me tell you something, its really simple and you dont need to know anything about some complex calculations and such which more of ten than not scare the users away. So one kewl app to test your code is XamlPad. This comes as part of the SDK and is located in the Start menu -- Programs -- Windows SDK -- Tools. You can type in Xaml in the lower window and you see what you design. Kewl isnt it. And yeah you can use the usual way of creating an Avalon app and typing in xaml inside the Window1.xaml file. You get the same results...

In one of my previous posts i briefly mentioned about data binding and I promised that I would have something on it soon... Anyway, I got hold of some articles which does a nice job of explaining it. So here are the links: What does Binding mean How should I decide whether to use DataContext or Source And not to forget, we do have the SDK docs for more information. Namita's Blog also has the PDC slides and the demos.

Lets move aways from the RSS readers... I hear some guys heaving a sigh of relief... hehe!! So lets start off with a timer which doesnt work as we usually expect it to..it works backwards!! Isnt that what we all wish. Anyway coming to the point, lets have a timer which counts down and on reaching ZERO plays a song. Sounds like a good app to wake you up when you plan to go for a short nap. The design is simple. We have a grid with the hour/min/secs and buttons for Starting and Reseting. There is a TextBox at the bottom which gives some status messages. :) The code looks like this in XAML: Window1.xaml <Window x:Class="timer.Window1" xmlns= http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/avalon/2005 xmlns:x= http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/xaml...

Hey all, I have now moved into my new house and the reality is yet to sink in... Its been a pain unpacking all the stuff and moving things around. Yeah, this take time when you got to have things in all the right places and right angles.... I'll be posting some pics of the house in a couple of weeks.. So continuing with the RSS reader, here I'll show how it can be done using the singlePageViewer. Looks like I am getting fixated on RSS readers... ;)..not for long though. A singlePageViewer is a nice way of presenting stuff for read-only purposes. In the code that follows we will see how hyperlinks work and how we make use of templates. To begin with heres how it looks like: We need to create a Browser app since Hyperlinks wont open unless...

An interesting feature in WPF is the availability of spell checking, which is limited to English language for now. The code is simple: <StackPanel xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/avalon/2005' xmlns:x='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/xaml/2005'> <TextBox IsSpellCheckEnabled="true" /> </StackPanel> As you can see, the only addition is that of " IsSpellCheckEnabled ". Thats all that needs to go in the code. As of today, the spell checker provides spell correction choices. But, it's very handy if we want to create a MS Word like editor. We also support spellers for Spanish,French and German. You specify the language using x:Lang tag in xaml. In the case of a TextBox the language on the control sets the...

The Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines (preliminary version) are Out!! You can download it from here . This document contains "information on What’s New in Windows Vista, design principles, guidelines for controls, text, windows, and aesthetics." This is a very concise document which is helpful to both designers and developers. May the force be with you ;)