Jim O'Neil's Blog : WPF

Awesome WPF/Silverlight Guidance

joneil — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:38:45 GMT

I don’t casually throw around words like ‘awesome', but this is indeed it. If you’re building applications for WPF and/or Silverlight, you’ve certainly become XAMLized, since XAML (eXtensible Markup Language) is the “common” user-interface description markup. Well, more-or-less “common”. Both technologies use XAML, but the level of support has subtle nuances, and things that are supported on WPF may not be supported on Silverlight (though 99% of Silverlight is supported by WPF). It’s not always obvious what the nuances are, and like me, you may have discovered them empirically – and uttered a few words of frustration not printable here.

The good news is that WPF and Silverlight are aligning, so “we feel your pain,” and the development process and support will continue to converge. Until we reach that nirvana though, the WPF-Silverlight Comparison Whitepaper is a MUST read for anyone embarking on (or currently developing) WPF and Silverlight applications. It’s a comprehensive 69-page document on just those nuances between the technologies that we prefer to know about before designing and coding – versus after!

The document was produced by our friends at Wintellect at the behest of Microsoft, and is, well, an awesome reference for developers in this space.

NERD to Host XAML Fest - May 27th - 28th

joneil — Tue, 12 May 2009 01:04:53 GMT

My colleague, John Pelak, is bringing another edition of the XAML Fest series to the Boston area, this time to Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center (aka NERD) in Cambridge. The past several sessions in this area filled to capacity quickly, and like those sessions we’re limiting attendance to provide an effective hands-on learning experience… in other words, don’t delay in signing up!

By the way, this is revamped content in light of announcements at MIX 09, so content now includes Expression Blend 3, Silverlight 3, and other cool features that were announced in March. John has all the details, agenda, and a FAQ at his blog post, but here are the particulars on registration and venue.

Date:	Wed. May 27 and Thur. 28, 2009
Time:	9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Place:	Microsoft NERD 1 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA
Cost:	Free (vouchers available for on-site parking)
Register:	e-mail xamlfest-boston@live.com (include name and e-mail of attendees)

If you can’t make the live edition, then you’re still in luck. XAMLFest online, a combination of live and recorded content, hits the airwaves from June 1st through the 5th. You can read more about the scheduling and registration here.

RIA = Developer + Designer

joneil — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:39:08 GMT

That’s an equation you’ll typically hear us evangelists espouse, with XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) being the lingua franca of the developer/designer relationship, and Visual Studio and Expression Studio the tools of choice. It’s a compelling story and one that’s easy to talk about, but face it, in my role, I mostly talk-the-talk, and it’s you guys that have to walk-the-walk.

Well, if anyone walks-the-walk, it’s Cynergy Systems, whose hallmark is RIA, whether it be with WPF and Silverlight or those other guys. A recent Forrester Research Case Study profiles Cynergy’s roots and approach to building software in this emerging space.

In a pretty amazing move, Cynergy announced it is providing the seven-page report free to the community (details in Dave Wolf’s blog post). It’s a great read, and technology-agnostic, so focuses on how to approach developing RIA solutions versus the specific tools and technologies that you might employ to deliver them.

Get into the MIX09

joneil — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:43:37 GMT

It’s exactly two weeks until MIX09, and here’s the scene from my home office window juxtaposed with one of the MIX09 venue. Vegas is looking pretty good, huh?

Weather aside, there’s a lot of other great things in store at this year’s edition of *the* conference focused on next generation web, rich internet applications, and the collaboration between developers and designers.

There’s nearly 30 sessions on Silverlight alone, including not one, not two, but three on what’s in store with Silverlight 3. There’s quite a few on ASP.NET MVC as well (for which RC2 was made available last night). Add to that Azure, Live Services, UI/UX, and you’ve got about 10 dozen sessions to choose from.

Check out the MIX09 site and schedule your ~~vacation~~ training now! And if you can’t be there, join Chris, Bob, and me on the Northeast Roadshow. We’ll actually be in Hartford and Augusta while MIX is going on.

Prism 2: Now With Silverlight

joneil — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:11:01 GMT

Back in the fall on our Northeast Roadshow, I presented on the various User ~~Interface~~ Experience options available for both smart client and browser-based applications. At the end of the discussion, I mentioned the Composite Application Guidance for WPF (also known by its code name of Prism). That body of work, the product of Microsoft’s patterns & practices team, was focused on helping you build enterprise-level, composite client applications, namely focusing on building loosely-coupled, pluggable components that can work together in the overall application.

While many of the ideas and techniques espoused by that guidance transcend WPF itself, there was obviously a “hole” in that Silverlight was not specifically addressed. At the time of my presentation, I mentioned a Silverlight version was ‘in the works’, and today the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight 2.0 was announced:

offering insight on building modular and composite Silverlight applications,
simplifying the composition of the user interface, and
providing guidance and light tooling on reusing code between Silverlight and WPF.

I’ve bolded part of the last point because it’s the most compelling piece of this to me. It’s the first official recommendation I’ve seen for the oft-asked question of best practices for delivering WPF and Silverlight experiences from a common code-base. I'm hoping it will help ease some of that “analysis paralysis” that we all have when trying to best leverage a new technology (or in this case TWO new techologies!).

“In the box” (so to speak), you’ll find the following. Enjoy!

Composite Application Library,
Reference Implementation (Stock Traders application in WPF and Silverlight),
Quick starts (9),
How-Tos (26), and
Lots of documentation for everything you want to know about UI patterns and client architectures.

B is for... BAML

joneil — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:21:14 GMT

BAML is....

Bamm-Bamm Rubble's rapper persona
Binary Application Markup Language
Superman's long lost uncle
A mixed-up ovine

Well, in keeping with the letter of the week, the answer is, of course, b, Binary Application Markup Language.

BAML is the compiled version of the XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) markup that describes the user interface of your application. At build time, the XAML is parsed and tokenized into this binary format to improve runtime performance (over parsing and loading the source XAML). BAML also provides a mechanism to support application localization.

In general, the existence of BAML is an implementation detail, but you can get a glimpse of it when building applications in Visual Studio by looking in the obj subdirectory for your build environment.

Also in that directory is a g.vb (or g.cs) file that implements the IComponentConnector interface, the two methods of which (InitializeComponent and Connect) serve to instantiate the user interface from the BAML resource.

The BAML is ultimately stored as a resource in the resulting EXE file as well. Using the .NET Reflector along with the BAML Viewer plug-in, you can disassemble the BAML format into its original XAML (see below):

One notable direct use of BAML in your development tasks is during application localization. There are several options for localization; however, choosing BAML as the mechanism has the benefits that you can perform the localization as a post-build step as well as merge prior localizations with a newer version of your application.

The steps of localization can be summarized as below (see MSDN for a more detailed description of the process):

Mark the localizable UI elements with a unique x:Uid attribute in your source XAML. You can do this manually, but that can be an error-prone process, so the recommendation is to use the /t:updateuid switch of msbuild as part of the build process.
Generate a neutral satellite assembly containing the localizable resources (which get included as BAML in the dll). To generate this neutral assembly at build time, you need to add a <UICulture> tag manually to your Visual Studio project file.
Parse the localizable elements from the satellite dll (using APIs in the System.Windows.Markup.Localizer namespace)
Perform the translation of localized elements to the target language
Generate a new localized satellite assembly

For steps 3 through 5, locBaml, a sample program included in the Windows SDK, provides a command-line interface to aid the localization process. locBaml wraps many of the Localizer APIs to extract the resources as a comma-separated (CSV) file. The localization (step 4) can then be carried out with any editor capable of handling comma-separated files - like Microsoft Excel. After the manual translation process is completed, locBaml can be run again to create the new localized assembly, using the edited CSV file as input.

At runtime, the .NET Framework will automatically load the appropriate localized assembly based on the CurrentUICulture, provided, of course, that the satellite dll is placed in the subdirectory matching the language code for the targeted culture (e.g., /de-DE for Germany or /fr-CA for French Canadian).

I Suru, Do You?

joneil — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:38:46 GMT

photoSuru that is... photoSuru is a WPF photo viewer application that was featured as part of Scott Guthrie's keynote at the Microsoft PDC this past October.

While it's a wicked pissah app just to play with, the real value in my mind is that the source code is all there on WindowsClient.NET, so those of you as user-experienced challenged as I can get a leg up on building an app that isn't all '90's'

...but that's not all. This app as well as a few other examples were built on the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit (try saying that three times fast!) This beta kit and SDK provide building blocks for you to create your own Syndicated Client Experiences (SCEs), which are basically applications that leverage RSS and the Microsoft Sync Framework to bring content to the local computer, where the application itself can take control of the presentation of that content.

You can download the SCE Starter Kit Beta 2; a number of videos and articles are also available there to give your insight into how the framework was used to build photoSuru.