The other day I wanted to have a timeline control in Sharepoint so that I could easily know where each project is in its lifecycle. Yeah, you could easily use Visio or some other diagramming tool but it does take effort. So a timeline control would be nice. In Sharepoint 2010, you can host a Silverlight webpart - so there you go, we need a timeline control in Silverlight. Searching on the web, I found one by Jose Paul and with a bit of tweaking and some code to connect to Sharepoint, got it working. As seen above, you can scroll through horizontally and zoom as well. Mouse hover pops up a tooltip with the start\end dates.. The control connects to the sharepoint site and searches for the list "TimeLine". It then gets the Field values...

It's finally out... yoohoo... Live keynote: Link Download: Link With VS 2010, you will be able to target platforms such as Azure, Windows Phone 7, Windows 7, Sharepoint, Office, Windows Server 2008 R2. Note that Silverlight 4 will be released later this week. Once released, you will be able to download an update that will allow users to target Silverlight 4 in development. This is an awesome release... Get your hands on it and have fun coding.. Share this post

At MIX today, Windows Phone 7 Development tools were announced to the public. You can download these from here: http://www.microsoft.com/express/phone/ Windows Phone Developer Tools includes: · Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone · Windows Phone Emulator · Silverlight for Windows Phone · XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP Share this post

So have you tried out .NET 4. If not, do give it a try. We have a bunch of new WPF features in .NET 4 and it was covered as part of the WPF features series . Now that we are close to release, whats next. This is where your feedback is invaluable . We listened to your feedback from 3.5 and incorporated several suggestions into .NET 4. Now its again time to ask for feedback to drive the direction for the next release. We would love to hear your comments\opinions on the following areas · What are the features you would like to see in vnext of WPF? You can also vote for your features here . · How can we improve the curve in learning WPF? Are there things we can simplify? · Feedback on tooling support (IDE, Loc, Designers, perf tools,.....

If you have been using XAML Power toys addin in VS2008, you would be happy to know that Karl has now got it ready for VS2010..Its got some nifty features like the ViewModel creator which automates the VM creation :)... You can download it from here Share this post

Came across Justin's post on the COM+ support in SL 4. Definitely a good read since it covers the feature really well. Link to the post

“ Fault injection is a t echnique for improving the coverage of a test by introducing faults to test code paths, in particular error handling code paths that might otherwise rarely be followed” - wikipedia TestAPI in its current release supports runtime fault injection. The API is pretty easy to use. It comprises of the following steps Part\Step# API Signature of the function where the fault is injected This is just a string Fault condition – specifies when to trigger the fault (static methods in BuiltInConditions ) TriggerEveryOnNthCall ( int n); TriggerIfCalledBy ( string caller); TriggerIfStackContains ( string method); TriggerOnNthCall ( int n); TriggerOnNthCallBy ( int...

If you have used Snoop, its very likely you are using it with 32 bit apps since it lacked the support for the x64 apps. Now Cory has built an x64 Snoop version with a few other enhancements. Link to Cory's post: Click Here Share this post

Putting this as a placeholder post for interesting links associated with MVVM. Informational Links http://blogs.msdn.com/johngossman/archive/2005/10/08/478683.aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVVM -- This has links to several other articles that are very useful http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd419663.aspx Template (works for vs 2008 ) – includes documentation\samples http://www.codeplex.com/wpf/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=14962 Screencasts Implementing Model-View-ViewModel in WPF Implementing Model-View-ViewModel in Silverlight Implementing MVVM & Exploring UX Design Patterns Several MVVM frameworks\libraries are available to make it easier implementing...

Here's the second post by Drake on the usage of Manipulation features.. Sample attached WPF Manipulation Basics Things to know before we start Understanding how RoutedEvents work might provide additional insight for this tutorial. http://msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/cc785480 . In the previous post we looked at the basics of the primitive Touch APIs. This was a good starting point for conceptual material, but when developing your application it’s recommended that you use the Manipulation APIs. In addition to providing a richer user experience you will also help ensure consistent behavior across Multi-Touch enabled applications. The Manipulation APIs are built on top of the Touch APIs. Generally using one implies that you will not...

In my previous posts, I briefly described the new WPF Touch feature. Was planning to get a more detailed post out but just couldnt get the time. Thankfully, Drake Campbell, one of our devs in Microsoft, sent me the following post on the basics of WPF Touch. Its a nice read.. So get started.... WPF Touch Basics Things to know before we start Understanding how RoutedEvents work might provide additional insight for this tutorial. http://msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/cc785480. What is Touch? Essentially it is your finger as the mouse. You can think of Touch as any action involving a single finger. Inertia effects, dragging and throwing something, are not included as part of Touch. Those are covered in Manipulations. Touch events include...

This is the last part of a series on New WPF Features The list of features covered here as part of this series: · MultiTouch · DatePicker\Calendar · Datagrid · Visual State Manager (VSM) · Easing Functions · JumpLists · Pixel Shader 3 support · Cached Composition · Full trust Xbap Deployment · Binding to Dynamic Objects · Custom Speller Support · Script Interop in Xbap · UIA Virtualization · UIA SynchronizedInputPattern · Input Key\Gesture Binding · TextFormattingMode · CaretBrush · SelectionBrush · Bindable Run · ClearTypeHint · LayoutRounding · Updated File Dialogs XAML 2009 · Built-in Types · Node Loop Flexibility · Event Handling · Named Object References...

This is part of a series on New WPF Features WPF supports multitouch API’s in .NET 4. You can have touch and manipulation operations on all the UI elements. For creating a touch based app, you would need to subscribe to the events: · TouchDown · TouchEnter · TouchLeave · TouchMove · TouchUp The TouchEventArgs class has some helpful API · GetTouchPoint - Returns the current position of the touch device relative to the specified element. · TouchDevice - Gets the device that generated the event. · Device - Gets the input device that initiated this event. (Inherited from InputEventArgs .) To add manipulations, you first need to set the bool IsManipulationEnabled property. Once done you can now listen to the...

TestAPI has come out with a new release V0.4. Please do check it out. So what’s new: Deep Object Comparison utility Text String Generation for random interesting combination of strings A Leak Detection API that enables the user to determine if the application is leaking Enhanced Combinatorial Variation Generation – supports tagged and weighted values

This is part of a series on New WPF Features These controls have been part of the WPF toolkit on Codeplex. They are now making their way into the framework. You can get the usage details from the codeplex site WPF Toolkit: DataGrid Feature Walkthrough WPF Toolkit: Visual State Manager Overview WPF Toolkit: DatePicker and Calendar Walkthrough < Calendar FirstDayOfWeek ="Monday" /> < DatePicker FirstDayOfWeek ="Monday" /> < DataGrid ItemsSource ="{StaticResource myData}" /> Have fun Share this post

This is part of a series on New WPF\XAML Features Another new feature in XAML 2009 is the possibility of creating objects using the non-default constructors. The keyword here is x:Arguments So creating a person object with a constructor requiring Name\Age could be written in XAML as < local : Person > < x : Arguments > < x : String > Tom </ x : String > < x : Int32 > 21 </ x : Int32 > </ x : Arguments > </ local : Person > Next interesting feature is using FactoryMethods… the keyword here is x:FactoryMethod <p:Guid x:FactoryMethod ='NewGuid'/> You could also combine x:Arguments with FactoryMethod < coll : List x : Key ='list' x : TypeArguments...

This is part of a series on New WPF\XAML Features XAML 2009 supports generics J .. In previous releases, if you needed to have an observableCollection for databinding you would probably have written code like class PersonCollection :ObservableCollection < Person > {} < l : PersonCollection > < Person Name ="Tom" /> </ l : PersonCollection > In this release, you can now write this as < ObservableCollection x : TypeArguments ='local:Person' xmlns ='clr-namespace:System.Collections.ObjectModel;assembly=System' > < local : Person Name ='Tom' Age ='21' /> </ ObservableCollection > … < ListBox ItemsSource ='{ Binding }' DisplayMemberPath ='Name'></ ListBox >...

This is part of a series on New WPF Features In previous releases, sending input through automation was tricky mainly because the app and the automation processes were separate. The app state could change between the time the input was sent and received. As an example, suppose you need to click something but before the click happens, the elements move (maybe due to resize …). In this case, some other element could get the mouse input. To overcome this problem, we have introduced the SynchronizedInputPattern . Now the framework sees where the input is going and if its not the intended target, the input is cancelled. The sender is notified whether the input operation was successful or not and based on it can make a decision to try again...

This is part of a series on New WPF Features Previously WPF only supported Pixel Shader 2.0 (PS 2.0). For this release, we added PS 3.0 support providing the benefits of more instructions, registers .... The usage is similar as before. However, we have provided an API to determine if the shader can be run on the machine. The API’s are self-explanatory · RenderCapability . IsPixelShaderVersionSupported (majorversion,minorVersion) · RenderCapability . IsPixelShaderVersionSupported InSoftware (majorversion,minorVersion) · RenderCapability . MaxPixelShaderInstructionSlots (majorversion,minorVersion) (snapshot of app on a PS2.0 supported machine) Sample project attached . Share this post

Pre .NET 4, from a UI automation perspective, virtualization was not a good story. There wasn’t a standard way of dealing with virtualized controls, since some would expose only the visual elements while the others would create an automation tree that had every element. To fix this problem, in .NET 4, we have introduced 2 new UIA patterns: ItemContainerPattern\VirtualizedItemPattern ItemContainerPattern enables searching the whole tree irrespective of it being virtualized. testObject.GetCurrentPattern( ItemContainerPattern .Pattern) Search is done using the FindItemByProperty function which has 3 parameters - AutomationElement startAfter: element to start search from. Setting to null would mean start from beginning - AutomationProperty...