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A lot, it turns out. Some long-time readers may remember my post of a year or two back where I set a fun little challenge to test what could be accomplished with just a single element of XAML . In the preparation for MIX09 , the team created a competition that offered slightly more room for creativity...

Kapow! Shazam! Zing! Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet drove in hard with a right hook last week , referencing my recently-returned-from-hiatus series of great WPF applications and asking why Windows Vista didn't have more killer applications. As one of her correspondents notes, and even Wikipedia highlights...

It's time for me to reboot this series that showcases great applications built on WPF. I left it on hiatus for some months because I felt that the point had been well made, but it's probably time to pick it up again, not least because there's a swathe of cool WPF applications out there that a lot of...

[Update: Happy April Fool's Day, everyone! For the avoidance of doubt, this was a hoax...] At the start of a new month, it's time for me to unveil a stunning example of how WPF can be used not just for dynamic, immersive user experiences, but also for even mission-critical services like the indexing...

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...

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...

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...

I've been trying with this series to satisfy the desire we all have for instant gratification by including plenty of applications that you can download and try out with just a couple of clicks. But of course, not every application fits into that category: there's a number of really important WPF applications...

I've been holding off from highlighting the New York Times Reader as one of the applications in my portfolio for a few weeks, even though it clearly is a polished example of how WPF can transform user experience. Today, we can finally reveal one more little secret, with the announcement of three more...

I'm behind on my write-ups of great WPF applications, and they're stacking up. Sorry! The next application I want to feature is one that has real purpose, in that it's being used by medical researchers at the Scripps Institute who are working on potential treatments for cancer. The Collaborative Molecular...

I love this little application: it's a joyous example of how the subtle use of WPF can add greatly to an application experience. NoteScraps is a handy little tool for jotting down little nuggets of unstructured information - when you're on the phone and someone needs to give you a reference number or...

I wanted to draw attention to this one, because it's such a fun usage of WPF. Each summer, the Solent waters (between the British mainland and the Isle of Wight) are host to a world-class sailing regatta with a thousand boats racing in forty different events. Coordinating this is a challenge: each course...

If you want to see a contrasting online shopping experience to Otto , you could do worse than look at fnac.com. FNAC are in many ways the French equivalent of Best Buy, selling all things electronic: cameras, MP3 players, televisions, PCs. To coincide with the Windows Vista launch, they've produced a...

I'm slightly accelerating the pace of these articles from the planned daily push, simply because there are just so many to cover. From the moment I pushed out the first entry in this series, I started to receive emails from people around the company and even outside Microsoft, telling me about the applications...

Although you may not have heard of them by name, Otto Group are a huge retail conglomerate with €9b of revenues in 2005/6; they own retail outlets like Crate and Barrel in the US as well as catalog companies like Grattan and Freemans in the UK and the eponymous OTTO in Germany. As the second largest...

Many of the applications I'll be highlighting in this series are highly graphically-intensive and media-centric. I thought I'd present a counterpoint early on in this series to highlight that Windows Presentation Foundation is also very capable as a platform for other classes of application. 90 Degree...

Enumerating the applications that I'm going to showcase as part of this portfolio on my whiteboard earlier today, I started to panic at what I've just signed myself up for - I've got lots of writing to do over the next week or two! I was quite surprised to see Mary Jo ask where the killer apps are until...

I'm going to start off this series with a real blockbuster that was announced just this morning. I've been looking forward to the moment when we could reveal this application for months, as I think it's one of the most exciting applications I've ever had an involvement with. The British Library is...

So at last we're finally done. As of today, you can go to Best Buy , Amazon or countless other stores around the world and purchase a shrink-wrapped copy of Windows Vista. Of course, this is not really the end - as a developer, it's just the beginning, because this is the moment where we get to see how...