Nigel Parker's Outside Line : WPF

Click Suite, Auckland Museum + the ‘Hybridiser’

nparker — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 07:54:00 GMT

Click Suite has a long history of awesome interactive new media projects. Their front end weapon of choice has almost exclusively been Flash.

Zef Fugaz has always been one for pushing the user experience to the edge and delivered a great session at the Microsoft Expression for Art’s Sake event on User Centred Design with Microsoft Expression.

As it turns out this event was a bit of a turning point for Click Suite and their adoption of the Microsoft Expression Studio for front end design.

Since the workshop, Click Suite have built and installed at the Auckland Museum the ‘Hybridiser’. An interactive, multi-touch 3D application that allows visitors at the museum to create an orchid hybrid flower by selecting 2 parent orchids and tweaking its different parts in terms of pattern/texture, shape & colour.

The ‘Hybridiser’ is built using WPF (.NET 3.5), Visual Studio 2008 & Expression Blend 2. The application runs on the Windows 7 release candidate & takes advantage of the Windows 7 gesture APIs.

If you are in Auckland I recommend that you visit Wonderland: The Mystery of the Orchid and try it out for yourself. My creation is below.

Aren’t incrementing ID’s a beautiful thing!? I can browse through others peoples creations (currently at 565 at time of writing)… I was just thinking it would be cool to make a dynamic interactive deep zoom (possibly using eventr) of peoples creations on the Auckland Museum’s website but I digress.

For everyone else not able to make it to Auckland to check out the exhibition in person I have made a little video of my interactions with the ‘Hybridiser’ below.

Incidentally this is the first time I have used the new Encoder 3/ Silverlight 3 player. Tip try clicking the cog in the top right to check out the perspective 3D chapters.

Here are some of the technical details behind the build.

Pieter Bosteels from click suite wrote:

To achieve the hybridisation effect we are morphing 3D shapes, patterns & colours individually. Each flower part is covered by different layers of greyscale textures which are colourised individually by a custom made HLSL pixelshader to allow the user to adjust texture/pattern vs. colour. Shape morphing is achieved by interpolation between individual mesh points.

Multitouch manipulation is achieved by attaching a single-touch move to a camera rotation, a dual-touch panning gesture to a camera translation & a dual-touch zoom gesture to a scale translation.

We’ve built all the 3D models in Cinema4D & then ported them to XAML using ZAM3D.

Everything is build using WPF (.NET 3.5), Visual Studio 2008 & Blend 2. The application runs on Windows 7 RC & uses the Windows 7 gesture APIs. We hooked into the gesture events using the Multitouch Sample .NET Interop Library for .NET 3.5 & Windows 7.

We thought about using the WPF 4.0 beta to have multitouch support built-in into WPF, but in the end we didn’t want to risk using beta software on a live environment.

This is a great showcase for WPF, especially in terms of productivity. It’s a good demonstration of how advanced graphics that are typically not available in rapid application development frameworks can be achieved relatively easily using WPF.

It is also a good showcase for WPF performance overall, with 3D rendering especially.

Without WPF, we could have never dreamed of getting the advanced stuff to work like it does now in the time we did it!

Zef Fugaz followed this with a comment:

For me as an observer the design and development team had a working prototype up and running in around a week. Pieter was in his element working with the visuals/interaction through code in close collaboration with the designers.

The hardened Flash developers who hasn't worked with the Expression Suite and WPF before seemed impressed with the capabilities of WPF and by the end of the project I heard them saying - "We never could have done this so quickly/easily using Flash".

This could make a great case study on design-dev team-work, rapid prototyping and a stunning visual design (+ multitouch to boot!)

Great work team!

As a side note when I visited the exhibition I chose to make a photosynth of the event.

Representatives from the Auckland Museum were quick to find my comments on Twitter and responded directly. Furthermore I was presently surprised to see them pimp the synth.

Making a photosynth of something I want to showcase is starting to become second nature to me. With a portable camera in you pocket it can be done in minutes and IMO shares the experience deeply with others.

WPF/ Silverlight Control Toolkit - Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP

nparker — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:08:00 GMT

In today’s PDC keynote theGu announced a new control suite for Silverlight 2 and WPF.

The Silverlight controls announced today don’t exist in WPF just yet but have been written in a way that can be easily ported to WPF.

These releases continue to drive towards the arrowhead vision for WPF and Silverlight.

photo Dru!

Tim has a post demonstrating chart databinding in action. Laurent has gone deep on the Silverlight controls as well.

The WPF Toolkit includes out-of-band releases of high-quality WPF controls and features. Many of these will be rolled back into the platform with the next .NET Framework release.

Included in the WPF Toolkit are:

DataGrid

DatePicker/Calendar

VisualStateManager (VSM)

If you are interested with what is around the corner you can check out the overview and download Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP today!

Watch Day 2 Keynote: Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, and David Treadwell

It Took Me Four Months But Here It Is - Thirty One Demos in Thirty Nine Minutes.

nparker — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 02:41:00 GMT

Four months ago I started a little project making a video out of a bunch of demos that I had been giving to different audiences over the second half of last year.

I finally finished the video over the holiday break and have today got it uploaded and live online.

I have updated my previous presentation link post...

Check out the facebook trailer (super fast)

Or watch the full video below:

1. Microsoft Research Group Shot
2. Sea Dragon (TED Video)
3. Photosynth
4. Microsoft Research HD View (Auckland, Wellington)
5. Virtual Earth (Live Labs on the Map)
6. Bill Buxton's Presentation from Expression around the Clock
7. Microsoft Surface
8. Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Surface Demonstration (Video Support)
9. French Silverlight 1.0 Application (Script#)
10. Tablet Features in WPF - Inking Over Video Sample, Ink Support Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight Ink SDK Sample
11. Silverlight 1.0 Inking Search Sample
12. Live Image Search (filters)
13. Tafiti Search Visualization
14. GPS location based interactive community (Where is Frank?)
15. Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Invaders - Code
16. Contoso Bicycle Club - Windows Live Quick Applications
17. Live Messenger Integration Demo - Details
18. http://backgroundmotion.com - Code/ Source Code
19. Microsoft Popfly
20. Windows Live Photo Gallery
21. Windows Home Server
22. LCI Intégrale
23. Livestation
24. WebGuide
25. hsn.tv
26. thirteen23 :: denounce
27. How About It?
28. the-hub.tv
29. Glenn Conner Interview - Amazon Demo Silverlight 1.1 Alpha
30. Building a 3D WPF Gesture Application - Code
31. Building a Video Player in 8 mins with Silverlight 1.0

As promised to many here are my links from recent presentations

nparker — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:17:00 GMT

UPDATE: I have finally had a chance to finish the video I have been making to showcase all this stuff so here it is...

31 demos in 39 minutes!

Links from my recent Mashup the Web presentations...

All Blacks Silverlight Gadget

Silverlight Space Invaders

Image Search (filter:face)

Tafiti

BackgroundMotion

Popfly

Silverlight Streaming

Demo Applications...

Evermore Reflection Video - Silverlight 1.0

News Feeds...

Shane - Wireframing in Blend - Starter Project

Aussie Remix videos

Expression Encoder...

Clarkezone

Custom Templates

Community...

If you are lucky enough to live in Wellington Nas has set up a user group for designers called http://zamdes.com. The Expression team at Microsoft is also kicking off a global design event in Auckland on the 4^th of October called “Expression around the Clock”. Places are limited but please spread the word and register at http://www.microsoft.co.nz/expression for the free half day Auckland event otherwise follow along on the global website http://expressionevent.com.

If you haven’t already please subscribe to the Microsoft Designer UX newsletter that we will start sending out once a month. You can subscribe by visiting http://expressionnewsletter.com.

Free Training DVD's in New Zealand

nparker — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 07:21:00 GMT

How would you like hours and hours (in fact weeks) of training and sessions on WPF, Silverlight and everything Web Related?

Arturo Toledo has even given us permission to share with you the Expression Blend, Web and Silverlight Hands On Labs from MIX!

One of my favourite labs is building the Expression Blend: Color Swatch that appears in the Blend Samples.

If you live in New Zealand take a trip to http://www.microsoft.co.nz/nextgeneration and grab a copy of the DVDs (including > 20GB of love) while stocks last!

We'll even throw in a bonus DVD of Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 (Beta 1).

Enjoy!

MIX07 Your Product is a feature of the Web!

nparker — Wed, 09 May 2007 01:44:00 GMT

~~It is now Sunday the 6th of May and I want to do my MIX wrap before I return to the office on Monday morning.~~ Well Wednesday isn't too bad ;)

First of all I just want to say "Wow"... last year MIX put a line in the sand marking Microsoft's strengthening commitment to the Web... this year we built on it in a big way with Silverlight's coming out party!

It was awesome to have User Experience, Design and Development represented so well at one conference and NEVER before at a Microsoft conference have I seen Mac's on stage in keynotes, used in ~ 1/4 of the sessions and available for attendees to drive themselves in the hands on labs.

The day 1 keynote featured Scott Guthrie. Scott pulled out Visual Studio and doing what he does best showed edit and continue debugging a Silverlight 1.1 application running on a Mac! Does anyone remember Scott's Silverlight (WPF/E) Vegas dice demo from Tech.Ed in Auckland last August? Well we've come a long way since then!

What was Scott Guthrie's comment during last weeks keynote?

"Now, not only do we support running applications on the Mac, we also support debugging the applications on the Mac. So, for example, we'll go here in Visual Studio now, and one of the things you can see that's kind of cool is we have a feature called Attach to Process. And you'll notice we now have a new option here called CLR Remote Cross Platform Debugging. You can tell that a dev actually named that feature. (Laughter.)

But you can see here you can go ahead and point at a machine, and in this case here I'm pointing at my Mac. We'll show you all the processes that are running on the Mac. Let's go ahead and attach to that Safari process, set a break point. Now let's go back to my Mac and push this again. So, you can see the debugger just broke. (Cheers, applause.) In case this wasn't obvious, this was really hard to do. (Laughter.)"

There are still plenty of skeptics out there regarding Microsoft's commitment to build world changing solutions for the web that run outside of Windows and Internet Explorer and time will tell now well we deliver. The teams inside of Microsoft (Silverlight, Dynamic Languages, Tablet PC) that have been working on these platforms have been absolutely buzzing over the last few days. I have spent valuable time with these individuals up in Vegas and earlier this year in Seattle... they are technologists... they love the global potential of their work and MIX for them (and for so many others) is their coming out party!

Ryan Stewart, Scott Guthrie and then Scott Barnes did a great job summing up Silverlight so I'm not going to cover that off here but there is one point I do want to quickly address. There is a bit of FUD online about Silverlight being a "Flash Killer". Silverlight is not a rip and replace technology and can happily co-exist on the same page as Flash, AJAX and HTML leveraging the best features of each platform (as I showed in my session at Connect back in March). That said there are some very cool things that people have been building using full blown WPF and more recently the Silverlight 1.1 alpha... take a look at this 1 minute mashup video I built from my favourite demos from these downloaded sessions.

Back in December last year we did our first UX tour where we presented on some of these technologies to New Zealand Web/ UX Designers. Although the event was generally very well received one comment stuck with me from that tour. The comment was as follows... "A pretty lame pitch that your finally doing what Flash has done for 10 years (except 3D)."

There is a lot of "opinions" out there and it often hard to find "independent" reviews of the technologies in this space. All I will say on this topic is that if you are a flash designer/ developer take a look at what Silverlight can offer you. One of the most compelling demo's for me is the Chess Game where you can play Silverlight JScript (view source enabled ;) vs compiled .NET Silverlight and also the Dynamic Language Runtime Console written in Silverlight 1.1 check out John and Jim's Just Glue it Video to learn more about this one.

If you are a developer I recommend taking a look at the Silverlight 1.1 Developer Reference poster. When I first saw this a couple of days before MIX there were a couple of things that lept out at me...

1. The poster announces Silverlight 1.1 support for Windows 2000 and Opera as coming soon... very cool!

What about Linux desktop? Well this is from the Silverlight FAQ's

"Microsoft is gathering feedback from customers like you on Silverlight and to help determine which platforms should be supported in the future."

Miguel thinks it will happen!

A while ago I got very excited about inking in WPF. I did not expect this to be ported to Silverlight the way it has been! The text recognition built into Vista is incredible (I used it to handwrite this entire blog post) and I thought there was NO WAY this could be ported into Silverlight since it is so embedded in the platform... but I didn't think of the alternative. Incorportate XAML inking support into Silverlight then use the ASP.NET Futures AJAX features to pass the XAML of the ink stroke asynchronously to the server for recognition... very cool! If you are interested in this the inking in Silverlight code and demo is available here.

Now the other thing to mention is that MIX was by not just a technology conference there were a number of very inspiring thought invoking speakers involved as well.

Lou Carbone grabbed me and held me for his entire presentation and Kelly Goto was at her quirky trendy best (1,2) stuckunstuck anybody?

Well that is all for me for now... there is plenty of stuff in here to get a hold of and starting playing with in more depth.

Remember that the WPF Family Show project is available with full source (266kb)for you to learn from. As is the Silverlight Airways sample from the keynote. The amasing Top Banana Silverlight Video Editor shown in the keynote will soon be available with complete source code... all 50k of it!

Also don't forget Kevin's Updated WPF Bag-O-Tricks (Very Cool FlipTile3D piece) and IdentityMen comics!

Tags: MIX07

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Technical Briefing Wrap and HOLIDAY!

nparker — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:38:00 GMT

First of all what does it look like to talk to nearly 2000 people?

Well here is a picture I found on flickr of 900 people... yup I'm in there #9 top row.

Think double this and we will be just about there!

It was all of you that made this event so successfull, THANKS!

Darryl did a great job of MC'ing the keynote at the events and holding it all together! The mindscape guys have done a great job bringing my backgroundmotion idea to life!

Presentation: Web Standards Compliance

Presentation: Extending Application Reach

Presentation: Building Composite Applications

In fact all the pptx decks are now online.

My presentation Building applications users love is there but without the link to the video that I promised.

Click the picture below to watch the Video!

I leave tomorrow for a trip around Europe with my wife and daughter followed by Mix in Las Vagas. The best part is that I'm not taking my laptop! See you again on the 7th of May if not a little sooner!

What is better than 1 offline newspaper to read on the Plane? 4 Offline Newspapers ;)

nparker — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 04:48:00 GMT

Tim broke the news this morning, the Daily Mail in the UK, forbes.com and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have joined the New York Times in releasing WPF based news reading applications.

From my inital checks it looks like Forbes is the only reader that has opted not to ask you to register to use it. This is interested as I discussed in my presentation at foo camp. The web has set a precedence that you will be provided information without providing an identity and hence most newspaper websites don't require you to log in. By providing a reader with a richer user experience the papers are able to request an identity (people are used to providing this for client applications like itunes, IM and email). The advantage here is that the papers are able to deliver more targeted advertising to their readers. Forbes appears to have gone against this trend and provide the data to the reader (no identity required).

From my initial investigations it still appears like the Times Reader is the most feature rich (with advanced search, note taking, emailing and saving or articles).

That said there is a great new accessibility feature in the Daily Mail called "Speak this article"... this goes further than the news in pictures feature of the times reader.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer also released a sidebar gadget (above) to launch the articles but compare that to the TVNZ and nzherald ones... IMO it needs a bit of work!

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Just saw this .NET 3 training

nparker — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 22:20:00 GMT

"The .NET Framework 3.0 training kit for WF, WCF, and CardSpace includes a set of hands-on-labs, demos, and presentations. The content was originally designed as part of the Windows Server Ascend training and has been used several times for training classes. Consequently, the content is organized into a four day agenda. You can also browse this content by technology."

Get it here

Also if you are an interactive designer and are looking for a good tutorial on using Expression Blend take a look at this one that Lee from Frog design has put together.

"It is called Expression Blend Beta Preview and it covers all of the basics of using Blend to create WPF applications. At the end you put what you’ve learned to the test by creating a Flickr photo viewer"

Alternatively check out these introduction Blend videos for a Microsoft Services guy in the UK.

Counting the days... 26 work days, 3 keynotes, 3 presentations and 1 external conference.

nparker — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 02:55:00 GMT

I just planned my time for the rest of Feb and March and I am overwhelmed by how much work I have left to do. But there is light at the end of the tunnel, on the 24th of March I am flying my family to Europe for a month long holiday!

I am going to be blogging infrequently over the coming weeks sorry about that!

The good news is that I have a bunch of stuff to share with you today!

1. Please if you are not already booked to attend the March Technical Briefing Events in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch book yourself a ticket today - www.microsoft.co.nz/techbrief. The events cost $199 plus GST and all attendees will receive a complimentary copy of Windows Vista Ultimate or Office Professional 2007! (conditions apply).

This event is going to be a bit different to what we have done before and I'm excited by the "Real World" scenarios we are building into the development track that if successful may be adopted by Microsoft worldwide!... That's all I'm saying for now but come along as there is no fabrikam here ;)

Also since Nathan, Darryl and myself have been charged with the keynote we are going to try and make it not suck (but we need your help). Create a 15-30 second video showcasing Windows Vista... you become part of the keynote and win some cool prizes. See http://www.geekzone.co.nz/vistavideo for details. Looking at the couple that have already been submitted don't rule out using humor and you could always try something like this... if 30 secs isn't long enough submit a series... get innovative... get funny... get going :)

Thinking of partners that you might like to see in the keynote, are you interested in seeing Right Hemisphere present? I mentioned a few times that I was working with them and their Vista support, they were even covered in the Campbell Live piece at launch.

2. The other conference I'm speaking at is this Emerging Web Technologies & Trends conference in Auckland. I didn't choose the title or the abstract so any feedback on what I should include in this presentation will also be greatly appreciated :)

3. On that note we have recently released MIX University as a place for you to learn more about some of the web and user experience technologies that I have been discussing on this blog... take a look here to get yourself up to speed.

If you want more check out this growing list of WPF applications in the wild and try this incredible 3D WPF visualisation of molecular structures, learn more here.

Hope to see you at an event in March!

My Tech.Ready (Well at least the parts I can talk about)

nparker — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:52:00 GMT

I'm starting my long flight home from Seattle to Auckland. Please join me for another long convoluted post about this week abroad all written and linked while disconnected from the Internet ;)

Each year technical Microsoft staff that are based out in the field fly to Seattle to attend a week long technical breifing. The briefings takes place twice a year and unfortunately I have got myself into the winter cycle. That said the weather has been great! I'm sitting in Seattle airport watching the sun set over the snow capped mountains and there is hardly a cloud in the sky.

The purpose of the briefing is for us to network with others doing the same job in other countries, to learn from product teams and to feed back customer information that we have encountered in our geographies.

This event is the pre-cursor to public events like Mix and PDC where many of the technologies we are discussing are seen in public for the first time.

So what are some of the stats for this year's event?

There were 6000 people in the keynote on Monday morning, there were ~700 session with >35 sessions running concurrently in each timeslot.

Since every session was recorded and streamed around the company worldwide in real time. This conference became the largest live meeting site in the world.

I made an effort to track down, see sessions and introduce myself to some of Microsofts new hires during the week.

I very much enjoyed Will Tschumy's (Ex Director User Experience for Flock) session on brokering the User Experience conversation with developers. Ethnography was mentioned more than once but the general principal here was that if you invest in UX upfront in a project it is much cheaper and easier than making changes later. The more time I spend with User Experience people the more I am convinced about this... if you are in Auckland on March 15 you might like to attend Intergen's twighlight event "Why User Experience and Usability are important to businesses online". Also I recommend reading Allan Cooper's "About Face 2.0" as a great introduction to the principals of User Experience.

I attended an architecture de-brief for the Otto project. This is a client based e-commerce store that extends Otto's web site to offer a premium service to their customers (similar to the New York Times reader). This was very insightful particular as we learnt how the project was designed by a German pioneer design company SinnerSchrader. Since showing this project at the Windows Vista consumer launch in Europe Otto has received many requests by other online and catalog retailers to license the engine they have built for their own WPF based client stores. If you have .Net 3.0 installed or are running Vista check out the Otto Store here (warning takes a long time for the inital catalog to be downloaded and cached locally and at the last stage they have there window on top of other windows which is annoying). I took a couple of screen shots of Otto in action below.

Watch Videos of models wearing the clothes... Add Clothes to your wardrobe and dress your model up with the clothes that you choose.

The store is harder to navigate if you don't understand German but a couple of things to note, all the images in the offline store are syncronised with images available on their website and are simply presented in a different way. The catalog is "updated" from the web each time you open it. The 'Mix n Match' (shown above) allows you to experiment and dress the model with different outfits as you browse the store. If you've read 'the long tail' you'll realise what Otto are doing here. They are using a smarter UI to make their catalog more accessible to their customers so that they can sell their products further down the tail thus creating a competitive advantage in a world where shelf space isn't limited and your preferences can be visually served up front and centre.

Bill Gates' presentation on Wednesday was very good. I have seen Bill speak at conferences a few times now and this was IMO indeed his best work. It was a very forward thinking presentation he talked about Microsoft Research and some of the projects that moved out of the research labs into commercial projects. It was interesting to hear about the tablet PC's begining in research and that there are more than two million tablet PC's sold world-wide. I've mentioned many times that I love my tablet. This morning I downloaded todays New York Times into the reader & used pen flicks to turn the pages reading in portrait mode in the tiny seats as I flew into San Fran. I couldn't help but smile when I saw others struggling with paper newspapers in the same seats! Incidentally I learnt this week that the Ny Times are now getting more page views in the reader than on their website!

Bill also talked about Moores Law and how the "free lunch" speed increases in our processors is coming to an end (possibly around 5GHZ) & how a much greater emphasis in the future will be put on writing parallel code for client machines running 8 or 16 core processors. Bill talked again about the concept of verifiable composability. In this brave new world we may need to go back to basics and re-invent the way we write software to take advantage of the multiple cores that are at our disposal. I couldn't help but be taken back to this post from a few weeks ago. It is no secret that Bill regards Ray Kurzweil as the greatest futurist of our time and he referenced his book 'The Singularity Is Near' during his presentation. Bill spoke with passion & genuine excitement of what is just around the corner in this fast moving technology age. Greater processing power on the client coupled with advanced virtualisation and the widespread adoption of services & backup in the cloud makes for a very interesting future indeed.

Kevin Schofield, head of Microsoft research followed Bill Gates. MS research is this year celebrating their 15th Anniversary. Kevin showed some mind blowing innovation! If only half the things that Kevin showed cross the chasm and make their way into commercial innovation in the next 3 to 5 years the world will be a better place.

I was very happy also to see the progress with WPF/E. Tooling is getting better for both the designer & the developer and there is a nice open jscript + XAML model available to try today in the browser & cross platform (yup search engines can index it!). Check out this site (click the left icon then use alt+v then c to view source if you are using IE7) that was built usign WPF/E as part of the Vista launch in Slovenia. There are some big new announcements coming up in this area at Mix so book your ticket to Vegas or check this site on April 30.

On Wednesday night I went out with Tony Chor (Principal Group Program Manager Internet Explorer or 2IC for short). I must admit that I have been quite suprised by all the press (1, 2, 3) surrounding Robert's presentation at foo regarding Mozilla's proposed offline support for web applications. Juha wrote in his Friday fryup "I asked Nigel from Microsoft if Redmond had anything similar to this coming up, but it doesn’t look like it"... how can you take two unrelated comments like that & put them together? We are not talking about features/timelines/dates or codenames for the next version of IE just yet.

What I can tell you... The IE team has more than 200 team members (sorry Asa I low balled that number when I talked to you at foo) they are absolutely taking the standards route welcome Molly and as I said in my previous post as the standards bodies are looking at offline caching the IE team is looking at it too. That said will any web developers actually write their applications to support the new offline capabilities if they are made available by the browsers? IE has had support for some of this for a long time in the form of the userData behavior which is used by Google but very few others. It isn’t quite as powerful as what the WhatWG has proposed here but it is pretty close. In addition to WhatWG Robert wrote... "The only really new API is an API for storing application pages in the "offline cache", and that's just a new "rel" keyword for the element. So it should be pretty easy to add this to any browser."

I caution you all not to blow this up at such an early stage as this feature may not make it into the final build of FF (or IE)... does anyone remember places or winfs?

If you are running on windows and want an offline version of your gmail today why not use Windows Live Mail Desktop, I love it and I use it to work with my hotmail account while offline.

While we are back on the Windows client side at the launch of Vista Mary Jo Foley asked where are all the 3rd party Vista applications? In response Tim Sneath did a great job summarising a bunch of these (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8). Although this is a good selection it is by no means conclusive. One of the ones that I saw for the first time during this week was a "showcase " piece of art created by the leading design firm in Japan. they were experimenting with using 2D raster images in a 3D plane. This is what they came up with... .Net 3.0 runtime required... this is not a video click the camera icon then try interacting with the 3D environment by using the zoom controls while the animation is playing. Also I see Warner Brothers Japan has a Vista ap as well.

Another thing I did this week was spend quite a bit of time listening and talking to John Lam about dynamic languages and the web. John was the only presenter I saw running a Mac this week, I guess it's the best way to test cross platform. Again if you want to hear more go to Mix or check if out virtually late April. If you want to see what Microsoft is doing with dynamic languages today travel to http://asp.net/ironpython. It was great seeing Polita of "Blinq" fame involved in these presentations. What do you guys think about getting this team down to NZ and Australia for Tech.Ed?

Thursday night was the party, it is a challenging task to feed and entertain 6000 people but the organisers did a great job of doing just that. Each different part of the warehouse on the pier was set up with food, music & dance from a different part of the world. I very much enjoyed the Jam session where anyone could pick up an instrument & get involved... some MS employees had some real talent here.

For the keynote on Friday we were spoilt with a presentation by Chris Bangle (Director of Design at BMW). IMO Chris was brilliant & very inspiring (yes I know he has his critics). He started... I'd like to thank Microsoft for teaching me the secret of dreams. I now know that they are simply your brain defragging over night!

Chris took us all In a very insightful journey of car design... he explained the visual language of the surface itself he explained how his designers learnt the skills of "industrial origami" and showed us new techniques st shaping steel in a way that it is asymmetric and creates an emotional connection. He took us through the 3 step design process that they employ at BMW (Understanding, Believing, Seeing). He talked about the importance of computer modelling in car design but he stressed that their modellers are clay sculptures first so that they don't forget that the computer is simply a tool. Virtual design is important but you must take your creation out into the wild at some stage to ensure that it speaks to your target audience. Also Chris is a strong believer in putting the best tools into the hands of the Consumer. Everyone can read & write but there are plenty of great authors still earning a crust. Chris believes in having a 'Consumer Dialog' joining humanism with industry and seeking consumer contribution in the process of design.

I think Chris' presentation resonated with many in the room there is a real synergy with the design process at BMW and the sea change of user experience that is taking place at Microsoft. You just need to spend some time with products like Windows Vista, Blend and the 2007 Office System to experience the feeling that the software just fits and works with you.

I am now inflight halfway home... I'm still handwriting in portrait mode. I have all my notes to reference. My email (hotmail included) is available cached offline (along with all the Rss feeds from the blogsphere from the last week or so). My complementary upgrade came through on Air NZ and I am for the first time stretched out in a sleeper seat. I ate a great meal, watched Babel and drank some fantastic wine. Whats more I have power! very important as I had to run from my Seattle flight to make this connection. All we need now is WiFi on air NZ and I could actually post this... goodnight :)

WPF Ready for Win Forms Prime Time? The Xceed DataGrid for WPF.

nparker — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 01:47:00 GMT

There was an email thread going around the NZ .NET mailing list yesterday asking whether an enterprise winforms developer should be looking at doing a new development of their LOB application in WPF or if it is still a little early.

Chuck suggested that "For most mainstream line of Business applications Microsoft still recommends using Windows Forms."

He goes on to say that "Until there is a 100% superset of WPF controls to COM AND Winform controls you are looking at the answer being: Use the best technology and integrate them together. For the time being that is almost certainly hosting your application Windows forms and doing the integration to WPF through WPF controls and elementhost”.

I have a slightly different take on this...

Although we are still at the mid stage of the process of porting all the controls and releasing the final cut of our WPF design surfaces (January CTP of VS "Orcas", Blend) some companies have chosen to build entirely in WPF for new applications. Remember that the .NET 3.0 platform is now released and it is also deployed by default in Windows Vista.

If you have complete control to build from scratch, you can deal with the bleeding edge and your target audience can run .NET 3.0 then absolutely build a true “next generation WPF application” like those at http://www.thirteen23.com. Kevin’s Bag-o-Tricks adds to the WPF controls shipped out of the box and includes a number of components (content slide, search visualisation) that were used in the New York Times reader application.

I see also today that Xceed has released a FREE version 1.0 of their DataGrid component for WPF (if you have .NET 3.0 installed you can try it here). This is a great example of the ISV/ component ecosystem shipping tools that make life easier for industry developers.

There is absolutely a place for new applications completely written in WPF and right now it is front and centre! New York Times Reader, Yahoo’s new IM client and I know we will be seeing many more arriving throughout 2007.

The key difference being that in this brave new world we are separating the roles of a designer and a developer but alowing them to work together on the same code base (although a person can of course still do both roles). Testament to this is probably Lee from Frog design that built the entire UI for the Yahoo IM client without any prior knowledge of coding in .NET. Lee is sharing his experiences with other "designers" like him that are looking at this technology on his new tutorial site http://contentpresenter.com.

IMO .NET developers that are wanting to get a grasp on this technology should read Code + Markup (which I have read and is heavily developer focused) or the recently released WPF Unleashed by Adam Nathan (software design engineer at Microsoft).

My opinion not Microsoft’s :)

CES Yahoo and Windows DreamScene

nparker — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 04:09:00 GMT

I have been linking to (Lee Brimelow) and http://thewpfblog.com for a while now.

Check out what Lee and the team at Frog rolled out for Yahoo at CES. Yes another commercial Windows Presentation Foundation application.

Oh yeah and I'm pretty excited about Windows DreamScene as well... here is my first concept video...

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What do you think?

Oh yeah and for those that watched Bill G's keynote at CES you might like to try out Group Shot as well.

What are you doing this Friday at 9:30am?

nparker — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 01:13:00 GMT

We'll be hosting our first ever live online technical chat with the WPF team at Redmond!

No registration just showup on Friday at 9:30am.

We'll have a collection of the WPF team on hand to answer your technical questions, hear your feedback on what we should be doing in our next release, share great tips and tricks for using WPF, and just generally connecting with one another.

If you're interested, you can open this ICS file to add the appointment to your calendar.

Hope to see you there - here's the URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats