White.Steve.Blog

Here are some shots of my first Gundam model. Gundam Astray Red Frame gallery It's a Gundam Astray Red Frame in 1/100 scale. The color scheme calls for a bright red for the frame but I wanted to experiment with something darker so I went for Hull...

Kit I bought the kit for about $13 from the local HobbyTown USA store in Redmond Town Center early in 2007. Prior to that, it must have been nearly thirty years since I'd bought and built a plastic scale model kit and that would have almost certainly...

This sample shows how to transform glyphs in a TextBlock. The kinds of things you can do here are letter-pair kerning and animating the translation or rotation of individual glyphs.

Today the Expression team is delighted to announce the availability of a preview version of Expression Interactive Designer. This preview version is the January 2006 Community Technology Preview [1] We have compiled a set of sample applications and...

Microsoft Expression “Sparkle Interactive Designer” ( Sparkle for short) was announced and demonstrated at the Professional Developers’ Conference in Los Angeles last month. To find out what this powerful tool is all about, see the Expression Home Page...

I’ve been a member of the Microsoft UK PSfD team for three and a half years now but, beginning on Monday, I’m moving to a new role in Redmond. Being an ADC has definitely been the best job experience I’ve had to date: the application development consultancy...

I've removed the SxS articles from the blog now because they've recently been published on MSDN. Please see my MSDNography links section.

Download the FolderTreemap3D sample (Requires Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP, .NET Framework 2.0 SDK Beta 2 (or Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2), and WinFX Beta 1 RC Runtimes and SDK ) Ben Shneiderman developed the treemap style of visualization...

Command-line build 2: XAML-only NavigationApplication In the previous post I showed how to build a very basic C#-only Avalon application. At the end I mentioned that declaring and initializing UI is probably not best done with imperative code. This...

I thought it would be interesting to walk through building some very basic Avalon applications. Some topics I want to introduce include Avalon’s application model; the interplay between declarative XAML markup and imperative CLR code-behind; what happens...

Download the ArthurTest sample Download nessie.obj Just before I started working at Microsoft nearly three years ago, I wrote a hobby project called Windows OpenGL Classes (WOC). It’s written in VC++ 6.0 (but it compiles with VS.NET 2002) and...

If, like me, you've been awaiting an update on Mark Lucente's research, you'll find this paper by Tyeler Quentmeyer et al fascinating: http://web.media.mit.edu/~vmb/papers/quentmeyerms.pdf Apparently ( http://www.media.mit.edu/spi/ ) the Spatial Imaging...

So I’ve talked about classes representing the ideas of note and interval . This post I’ll cover Voices.ScaleClass , Voices.Scale and Voices.KeySignature . A scale is an interesting interplay between notes and intervals within an octave. As an example...

So, I spent the past two weekends and every evening between finishing these. Please check them out and let me know what you think. Registration-Free Activation of COM Components: A Walkthrough Registration-Free Activation of .NET-Based Components...

I posted the article "SxS Managed COM With Manifest Resource (WinXP and Win2K3)" some time ago and Jason Buxton was interested in applying it to Visual Basic 6.0 client applications. Well, I've put together an MSDN article proposal which addresses that...

In the previous post in the Voices category I showed my re-imagined Voices.Note class and its close relatives. You can already see that the new design has a useful separation of tone from note . I had also mixed solfeggio and scale into my initial, abandoned...

Appendix A – Definitions Accidentals Accidentals are the sharp/flat/natural ( ♯ / ♭ / ♮ ) symbols in a note’s name. A note with either no accidentals or with a natural symbol in its name is natural . Each sharp or flat symbol in a note’s name indicates...

Follow this link and under Development you’ll see the job title Developer Consultant PSfD. Tell them Steve sent you. :-)

Jason, thanks for your comment on the previous post. What particularly resonated with me was "Making it work for real would be a big deal where I work," because I'm part of Premier Support for Developers and our job is helping enterprise and ISV Microsoft...

This article is now superseded by the "Registration-Free Activation of .NET-Based Components: A Walkthrough" MSDN article. Please see the MSDNography links section.

Recently I’ve been researching into Isolated Applications and Side-by-side Assemblies [1] for one of my customers. I thought I’d share a few evidently little-known rules and gotchas around this technology. I actually have a lot of these, and I’m still...

So this year I threw away my code and started again. I believe that the two fundamentals of music are note and interval and that all else (scale, chord, etc) is build from them. Rhythm (i.e. time) is an orthogonal dimension and I’ll save that for much...

So, the middle of last November I started doing some thinking and designing and putting some C# classes together in a library. It was a bit of a false start as I’ll explain, so this year I started the project afresh with the benefit of what I’d learned...

Despite having studied some fairly highbrow harmony textbooks, it was actually the Beatles book (listed in the previous post) that prompted me to start distilling what I was learning into software. I’m sure I saw a quote once which said that a program...

Voices - your songwriting studio Welcome to Voices! Before you learn how to use the software to write great songs you’ll need to know, at a minimum, some music theory and sight-reading essentials. I believe you’ll also need to understand the principles...