Microsoft is today announcing Photosynth , Live Labs first major Technology Preview. Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space. With Photosynth you can: · Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle. · Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size. · See where pictures were taken in relation to one another. · Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing. · Explore a custom tour. The videos can be seen here . The release of the actual app is in the very near future... I can smell it :) You got to check this out...

In V1, we do not support HTML format in Editing. As such, when you copy from IE and pasting into WPF, we basically use the rtf format. However, theres some good news. :) We do have a tool which enables this XAML-HTML scenario. The tool is available at: http://windowsclient.net/downloads/folders/controlgallery/entry2313.aspx

The date picker/ calendar control is now available at the WPF website. The controls were initially part of WPF but were removed for various reasons. However, it was promised that these controls would be made publicly available as a sample and its now public :)...yoohoo!! http://wpf.netfx3.com/files/folders/controls/entry5875.aspx UPDATE: these controls are now part of .NET 4. You can download the beta1 version (as of 7/23/09) Its also available in the WPF Toolkit on codeplex ( http://wpf.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=29117 ). This code was released prior to be being included in 4.0. If you have 4.0, you dont need to use this dll.

A couple of weeks ago I had posted an entry on obtaining control styles and this post also had a zipped file. Now some of the readers replied back commenting that my post was incomplete as I had no mention mto the zipped file. And it turns out that I just missed deleting it ... :) ... The problem was that it never compiled on the May bits - so had to wait until the June CPT was out. But now thats it out - lets bring the rabbit out of the hat. The zip file is an app by Eric Stollnitz from the EID team and this handy tools allows the user to examine the control styles. hmmm... EID users might not find it very useful as its just a few clicks to get the style :) .. byt hey, for the non EID users, this is really helpful. The zip file is attached...

Usability is an important aspect when it comes to UI design. The emphasis is on the look and feel. So when it comes to creating your own controls it would be good if they look and feel like rest of the apps - theme dependent. A little zing here and there is good :). Making custom controls theme dependent is pretty easy. All you need is a folder named themes inside which you place the theme file containing the control style. The file name should correspond to the theme. themes\<Theme Name>.<Theme Color>.xaml themes\luna.normalcolor.xaml themes\luna.homestead.xaml themes\luna.metallic.xaml themes\royale.normalcolor.xaml themes\aero.normalcolor.xaml themes\Classic.xaml Also include a generic.xaml file which...

SpellCheck is an interesting feature in Editing and it has evolved quite a bit. In earlier versions, the spellcheck on the RichTextBox and Textbox would look at the lang property on the control. However, now in the case of RichTextBox the input language is determined and the appropriate speller is used. So for instance I type in "dogf" in English and then type the same with the Keyboard input being German, then for both the words the choices are diferent because 2 different spellers are at work. Thats a very nice enhancement when you compare it with MS Word which can have only one speller working at a time :) When it comes to TextBox, the speller is based on the input language set on the control. In earlier versions this defaulted to English...