From the beautiful city of Zürich in Switzerland comes this great example of how WPF makes data visualization a snap. In the scenario we're looking at here, the airport wanted a way to be able to track and manage flight operations.

I'm sure we've all been in the situation of waiting at the airport to collect someone, but not knowing how close they are to getting out of the terminal. Usually all you have to go on is a bank of monitors that shows the flight status as "Landed", which doesn't tell you whether the plane has literally just touched down, is taxiing around the airport, is actually docked at a gate, or is emptying its load of passengers. If you're monitoring the airport operations, this is a business-critical problem: how full are the car parks? Are planes backing up for a particular runway? How many gates are open?

In the case of Zürich Airport, they now have a new tool built on WPF that can help answer these questions and more. This application, built as a XAML Browser Application, provides airport operators with an immediate overview of the real-time status of every plane. On the operator's display, every plane shows its location on a map, colored in a gradient from red to green that shows what percentage of the aircraft is full. Since every aircraft transmits its location thanks to GPS, it's possible to follow it from the moment the pilot powers the systems on to the moment that the aircraft leaves the airport environs.

Similarly, they've built in instrumentation for the car parking garages, so it's possible also to see where any capacity issues exist for people who are arriving at the terminal. Once again, a red/green gradient shows how full any individual garage is.

For obvious security and scalability reasons, it's not possible to make the live application available over the Internet for anyone to access. But they've kindly given us permission to post a public demonstrator for the application along with some historical data so you can see it in action. Thanks to the power of XBAP deployment, you can see this here on netfx3.com.

Since this is real historical data, you get to see the application in all its rawness. There's no smoothing of the GPS signals, so occasionally it looks like an aircraft is not pointing in the right direction or it "jumps" to a new locations. Planes suddenly appear: I presume that's when the aircraft power system is turned on for the first time and starts communicating with the tower.

Several helpful shortcuts for using the application are presented on startup; I recommend modifying the "Airplane zoom" and "Playback time" sliders to about 50% so that you can see the aircraft capacity and the planes move at faster than normal speed. You can experiment with other options in the toolbar - for example, you can change the color binding for the aircraft to represent length of delay or airline rather than capacity.

Special thanks to Ronnie Saurenmann from Microsoft Switzerland, who was pivotal in realizing this application and kind enough to arrange to make this available for the broader community to see.

Let's say for a moment that you're a small business trader that needs to be able to receive payments both over the Internet and as point-of-sale transactions. You need a way to be able to handle expenses, manage accounts receivable and generally keep track of your cashflow. You probably even need a way to handle checks (or maybe you receive cheques if you live outside North America!). If only there were a payments framework that provided all these services. If only they had a WPF interface so that your customers were impressed by the sophisticated system you had!

Introducing IP Commerce, with their Payments as a Secure Service (PASS) offering for Windows Vista, built of course on top of the Windows Presentation Foundation. PASS unites a group of partners - including the likes of Chase and PayPal - to provide an integrated service for small businesses to perform all the capabilities mentioned above. The core application is a free download; it includes a basic Cash Management Center and the Commerce Center, both of which are built with WPF. To create the charting component, they used ChartFX - a new WPF-based graphing control from SoftwareFX.

The application has some useful features - for example, the included sidebar gadget can be set up to let you know whenever you receive a payment via PayPal. It also uses aspects of WPF well; for example, the screenshot of the Cash Management Center demonstrates the use of data templates with a ListBox that contains thumbnails of the individual reports.

The final release of the VS 2005 update for Windows Vista is now available. This update fixes most of the issues that you may have faced with running Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista. Install Visual Studio 2005, the Service Pack 1 update, and then the Windows Vista update to get a fully-supported developer environment.

There's also an interesting interview with Soma (the VP responsible for the Developer Division here) on Microsoft Presspass. The questions are a little soft (the interview is posted on our press relations site, after all!) but it's a good review of where the developer platform is today and the focus areas for the developer tools and platform part of the business.

Over the last week or so, our two "TV stations" - Channel 9 (for developers) and Channel 10 (for power users) - have been running a series of videos around Windows Vista. I thought I'd quickly highlight some of my favorite ones:

• Robert Fripp and the Windows Vista soundscapes: this is classic Channel 9 - a documentary-style video that shows the process leading to the Windows Vista startup sound. Mellow, ambient, ephemeral. I love Fripp's work - Equatorial Stars is a particular recommendation of mine (a collaborative project that he did with Brian Eno).
• Extreme WPF Makeover: this is something we've had hanging around for a while, but it's not had nearly enough exposure. We recorded a fly-on-the-wall video that shows the process Frog Design went through to redesign Radiant's point-of-sale system. It's an interesting introduction to the value a designer can offer - not just "adding pretty graphics", but rather the interaction design work that produces a measurably more efficient application.
• Transactional File System: this is a feature in Windows Vista that very few developers know about, but over the next five years has the potential to make a big difference to the stability and reliability of every application. Every file system and registry operation can be built as a full ACID transaction at the system level. This represents just a few of the many hundreds of new unmanaged APIs shipped with Windows Vista. Some great information from Jason Olsen on this here; with reference docs available here.
• Windows Stress: what happens within Microsoft when a Windows Vista or Longhorn Server daily build is ready? Thousands of machines both in the stress labs and around the Redmond campus spin up an insane stress test that sucks all the memory and handles and then pushes the machine to the limits with an intensive set of feature stress routines. This is an incredibly tough test pass that helps us find obscure bugs (like a race condition that only happens in a very unusual set of circumstances on a particular piece of hardware). It also helps us make an assessment of the overall robustness of the operating system as we get closer to launch. I've been fascinated by what this team does for years; this video exposes their work to the outside world for the first time.

More Windows Vista Week videos can be found at the following locations: Channel 9 | Channel 10.

I'm hoping that by now, you're starting to get a sense for the range and breadth of real-world WPF development that is going on in all parts of the industry. We've just scratched the surface here: there are many hundreds of WPF development projects underway based on statistics from just our ISV early adopter programs. If you've got something cool to show off, why not add it to our WPF wiki?

In the world of ISVs, there are very few that have broader reach than Roxio. Many millions of PCs each year are sold with pre-loaded Roxio software, from some of the largest manufacturers such as Dell and HP. You can imagine that when Roxio bets on a new technology, it's going to get plenty of traction in the marketplace. So it's my great pleasure to note that Roxio have built the core of their next-generation media software using WPF.

Roxio Central provides a hub into common tasks like DVD burning, ripping music, backup and archival. The design is a classic example of how WPF is changing the user interface of even utility software: simple, task-based, inductive. There's great use of animation and vector-based graphics, and the seamless integration with Windows Vista provides an experience that you couldn't get with any other technology. Working with IdentityMine, a design and development partner based in Tacoma here in the Puget Sound area, Roxio were able to take their design mockups from Expression Design and convert them to XAML, where an integrator could connect them to the underlying logic using Expression Blend. (If you're interested in the process, Robby Ingebretsen will be presenting a session on the application's design at Dx3 in Boston.)

Here's what Paul Spallas (Art Director for Product Design at Roxio) has to say about their usage of WPF:

"Working with Microsoft’s new design tools and the WPF platform has been an empowering experience. [They] help design and development teams collaborate more effectively. More importantly, they allow software designers to quickly and accurately turn innovative user-interface concepts into reality."

Nathan Dunlap from IdentityMine also blogs about their experiences building the application here.

Roxio plans to build their next generation of products based on the Roxio Central WPF design architecture. If this isn't strong validation of the platform, I don't know what I have to do to convince you all! On the offchance that you'd like to try Roxio Central out, here's a link to the trial version (currently in beta).

Stay tuned - there are plenty more applications in the pipeline for this series!