I picked this one up via Rob Relyea (of the WPF Team), the long awaited and much requested DataGrid for WPF is available on CodePlex. For more information (including a screenshot), Vincent Sibal has a detailed 'how to use it' post
Requires .NET 3.5 SP1 to run, and it'll eventually will make its way into the WPF core libraries (I think?). Out of band releases are nice.
My Demo's Happen Here entry (entries closed last month) was on Visual Studio 2008, how it can rock your socks by creating Twitter clients in WPF and Silverlight.
Or you can stream the original video in WMV from Silverlight.Live.Com. You can download the solution (73kB) containing the three projects, which requires the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK.
For interests sake, the screencast was recorded using Microsoft's Community Clips Recorder and edited with Windows Movie Maker - both free (well, providing you have Windows). Community Clips Recorder is fairly basic when you compare it against Camtasia, as it has no editing, zooming, or highlighting capabilities. However depending on the situation Camtasia is overly complex and the price difference is something to be considered.
With Remix over, I thought I'd sum up my thoughts on the event. Last year's Remix was my first Microsoft event, but now I have a few more under my belt. This year I hung around Stephen Price, whose Quokka cartoons were featured all over the Remix blog. Stephen's a very cool bloke, even if he gets lost too easily.
While Mark Pesce's keynote speech was fantastic, I'm not sure how much relevance there was to most of Remix. The content of Remix's sessions were always going to be about about XAML (Silverlight/WPF), IE8/ASP.NET, and Expression Studio - that is technically focused, rather than the social implications. The Live Platform session (the third session) certainly did expand on "hyper-connectivity" (social) and the technological side of things, but the rest of the Remix "conversation" was perhaps a bit too focused on the technical or product side of things. That aside, I will repeat, it was a fantastic presentation. Get yourself on Twitter now!
If you weren't at Remix, watch the video above (text version)
Speaker: Joseph Cooney
I quite like WPF, but I haven't really seen the need to move to .NET 3.5….until Joseph's presentation.
.NET 3.5 cool things are:
The WPF cool things are:
Ugly things:
Joseph's slides and demos are up on his blog already!
Speaker: Tim Aidlin
This was a fairly run-of-the-mill "I have a new application, let me show you it" presentation, covering Expression Studio 2 (except Expression Encoder 2) as well as Deep Zoom Composer. Unfortunately, for any attendees of Remix 07 or Mix On Campus, this sort of stuff (albeit for xStudio1) was pretty much what the events were all about last time, and it felt like the audience knew a bit more (about their favourite specific application) than Tim did.
While the list of new features to xMedia2 are neat (RAW image handling, batch renaming, metadata browsing, voice annotations, gallery generation), I still don't really know what its purpose is in the Expression Studio suite. If it was a free app I could probably find a use for it, but for photo/image management Live Gallery is "good enough", and I manage all my music in Media Player…maybe its great for video management?
Contrasting with statements from Lee Brimelow from last year (that "everything you can do in Design, you can do in Blend, so I don't see the point of xDesign"), Tim showed off xDesign2 and some of the reasons why you'd use it over xBlend. Yes, you can probably do everything in xBlend, just like everything you can do in Photoshop can be done in Paint. Being a developer, I think I'll still be sticking to Blend, but I could see how the more artistic parts of XAML would be easier in xDesign.
Despite the improvements to xWeb2, as a developer and somebody who has been generated CSS/(X)HTML for years, I will not get any value out of xWeb2. VS2008 does all the stuff I need to do, or Notepad++ steps in when I need to go kung fu on my CSS. PHP IntelliSense/support has made it in, but this should have been a feature in xWeb2.
Speakers: Angus Logan, Bronwen Zande, John O'Brien
I didn't really know what to expect from this session, the Live Platform session sounded like it would be pretty boring, but I wasn't overly interested in the other session which was upstairs, so the Live Platform session it was! I was pleasantly surprised, as this was a very cool session, possibly my favourite for the day! My laziness paid off!
The key things were how you can use Microsoft's Live Platform to create incredibly interactive websites by making use of the Live services such as Virtual Earth, Live Messenger (/Hotmail) contacts/presence, Spaces, Storage (FolderShare/SkyDrive), Notifications (via email, SMS for North America, or via WLM through the alerts service).
For a few projects I have in mind, the Live ID login system looks appealing, although I'm wondering if a service like OpenID is more 'acceptable' (by end users, since Microsoft is so evil and all, apparently). I'd be very interested in the Live Platform Team's view on OpenID vs LiveID, or if they can coexist.
Angus left Twhirl running while giving his presentation, so I managed to get a few tweets popping up on the screen!
This session showed off the new ABC Silverlight Store, which while cool, is all Silverlight v1 stuff. It just seemed to lack the "wow", going over very similar things that were covered at Remix 07, without the edge the original presentations on Silverlight v1 had because it wasn't new. I walked out (I needed a break/fresh air, not because I was bored) before it finished, so the last 15 minutes may have been awesome, its hard to tell.
The Silverlight Store also had a matching desktop client…written in Silverlight? I think (as a demonstration of the power of Silverlight and WPF), it would have been mucho cooler to do that in WPF. The technical reasons for not doing so are more than understandable - WPF weighs in at 20meg, and Silverlight at about 4meg. Both clients being Silverlight means just one framework download/install, which is much more friendly for the target audience.
The presentation was done using DeepZoom, zooming into each slide or diagram to show more detail, such as exploding a file overview into the actual code behind that file. That bit was cool.
I skipped session five, not because of the content available, but because I ran into Long Zheng, and we got to chatting. Long has a new Zune ("Long Zhune"). He's a cool guy, with or without the Zune!
Speakers: Shane Morris, Michael Kordahi and David Lemphers. Originally meant to be presented by Leslie Nassar
I've been looking at creating a mobile version of MahTweets, using .NET CF. The three problems I have with .NET CF are limited controls available, it's all WinForms crap, and only available on Windows Mobile phones. Silverlight, however, will be on Windows Mobile phones and Nokia's S60 and S40 OS' phones, uses XAML solving both WinForms problem, and amount of controls available!
A good list of S60 phones can be found at the Nokia Gaming Blog - I think the cool thing is that it includes the popular E65, and all (I think) of the powerful N series phones! It is foreseeable that other phones (or browsers) will eventually be able to play Silverlight as well!
Shane talked about how Mobile is already big, but is already accelerating faster than PC/laptop markets, and the ways designs will have to change not just for the limited capability or screen real estate, but the way the mobile user "snacks" on content.
Michael demo'd Silverlight on a HTC WinMo phone, but unfortunately its "pre-pre-pre-beta", so we aren't able to play with anything yet. Apparently some of the other Remix events around the world pulled the Silverlight mobile content! The goal of the Silverlight mobile project is to use the exact same Silverlight tools, and allow all existing Silverlight stuff to just work - you wont have to compile to "Silverlight Mobile", ala .NET and .NET CF.
During Session 5, I had Long talk me through what his teams project was all about. It is very cool, but rather than fumbling around to describe what it is, he's already blogged about the team SOAK entry.
Congratulations again to Long, David Burela, Edward Hooper, and Dimaz Pramudya! Good luck in France guys.
It was fantastic to see that some of the feedback from last year made the event change this year, such as including free wifi and 'recharge' stations. Unfortunately, the wifi/net connection weren't too stable up until ~3pm, and other suggestions such as including pens for the feedback forms didn't make it through, so Stephen and I pinched one of the vendor's pens.
I can't remember if I wrote down "better food", but this year had a lot less salmon and cold wedges! There were even TimTams! ('cause, you know, this it totally the most important part of the day).
This year the event was split across Melbourne and Sydney, and cut down to one day (each). This year's venue (Melbourne Town Hall) was both better and worse than last year. More room to move between sessions and chairs to sit on, but higher ceilings (which created echo's and "lost the vibe"), consistently bad lighting and uncomfortable chairs during the sessions all worked against the Town Hall. A few others agreed on the venue being 'so-so', and Ed Hooper suggested that the Melbourne Convention Centre, which is where Heroes Happened was held, would have been a better choice - which I agree with.
Remix is still in an infant state, its still learning about itself, but it is developing, experimenting and evolving. While not everything was perfect, I still will be attending next year because despite all my complaints it was still a great (albeit exhausting) day. Next year, however I think I'll just take my camera and a notepad, rather than laptop + camera, which is fairly weighty. I'll also sit a bit closer so that some more of my photos turn out. Argh!
Just like last year, Nick Hodge has a summary post of activity on the blogosphere about Remix.
TweetSaver has slowly been creeping into the CodePlex project for MahTweets over the last week or so, and now the first alpha release of it is live!
It uses MahTweets (requires MahTweets "Alpha 3" and up - Alpha 3 is designated by Change Sets 4309 or higher) and WCF for communication (TCP endpoint). Just like MahTweets, TweetSaver will get tweets in real time as MahTweets pushes out the tweets via WCF, which means no more Twitter API calls are made!
The really cool part of this would be if you had one MahTweets 'server' (for lack of a better word), and TweetSaver on an entire office of computers. One connection/set of API calls could do an entire office (of…your twitter feed). If you went to any of the Australian Heroes Happens Here events, you'd have noticed they had lots of twitter screens setup, all logged into the Twitter webpage - this would get around having each one logged in, and look prettier ;)
You're downloading this of your own free will, so we take no responsibility if your computer crashes, hard drive self formats, you develop a drinking problem, and so on and so forth. While it is an "alpha" release, at worst, it should either crash itself or hog resources - nothing "deadly".
Download the release-build of changeset 4309
What is Mah Tweets? According to the description (that Will wrote, I corrected),
"Mah Tweets is a Twitter client with a difference.
In addition to using the regular Twitter API, it uses the Jabber protocol to get instant notifications from Twitter. This also means it's capable of using Twitter's Keyword Tracking notification services. "
To sum that up, Mah Tweets gives you your twitter feed in real time (for people you have on device/im notifications), rather than what the usual Twitter client does, which is scrape the API feed every minute or so. Mah Tweets does that too, so those you don't have on notification will still be seen!
PLEASE NOTE THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE.
Mah Tweets Alpha v2.1
Thanks to the help of Will, MahTweets is now also available on Codeplex…that means source code and all!
Codeplex for those who don't know, is sort of like Microsoft's answer to SourceForge. Through TeamExplorer 2005/2008, it allows you to manage it all through Visual Studio, instead of using a standalone tool (which for me, I'd always forget. My tests of CVS/SVN have failed because of that)
Ever noticed how some applications tend to hang when you perform an operation? For example in MahTweets (my Twitter client), it used to have a looong pause every time it updated the Tweet list, and often the application would go black, almost to the 'not responding' stage. The GUI and application logic shared the same thread, meaning a massive change in GUI or lots of processing in the logic would stop the other.
The way around this is to use a separate thread for anything that requires a lot of processing, or that is bottled by another factor (Disk IO, or network speed, etc).
public delegate void MyDelegate(); // This method could be the method behind a button.clickpublic void InvokingMethod() { Thread myThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(new MyDelegate(MyMethod))); myThread.Start(); } public void MyMethod() { //Code to execute on new thread goes here }
There is one caveat, your new thread cannot access the GUI because this could cause some serious synchronisation issues. The way around this (in WPF at least!) is to use the Dispatcher.Invoke method.
public void GuiMethod() { if (!Dispatcher.CheckAccess()) { Dispatcher.Invoke(DispatcherPriority.Normal, new voidDelegate(GuiMethod)); return; } //Code that accesses the GUI }
If you need to pass parameters, one (quick) way is with an anonymous delegate like below, I'll let you figure out the different ways to go about it though.
Thread t = new Thread(delegate() { MyMethod(MyParam); });
If you are having problems with concurrency and synchronisation, that's outside the scope of this post…start looking at wikipedia's article on threading, and go from there.
I've tried to get excited about Silverlight, particularly when I found Silverlight stickers laying around at Mix on Campus and took one for my laptop.
Silverlight 1.0 sucked (this is in my opinion) because it was Javascript - ew ew ew. It was essentially an interesting graphic engine with some pretty good video (/streaming) tech. The killer here was Javascript - if I'm going to use a Microsoft technology, I damn well want to use C#, or another .NET language I'm already using.
Silverlight 1.1 was better in that it used .NET, but it sucked because if you wanted to do anything, you had to build all the controls (such as buttons, or listboxes, etc) yourself. NOT FUN AT ALL. While yes, Silverlight 1.1 was renamed 2.0, I'm referring to the 1.1 Alpha September Refresh.
Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1, now ships with most of the standard "WPF" controls (or controls very close to them anyway), meaning it requires very little effort to go from a WPF application to Silverlight 2 application - that's cool (and check them out on the samples page). And it can communicate with SOAP(Limited? v1.1 BP I believe)/XML services rather well, I've got a WSDL thing going on - that's cool. Oh, LINQ too? Local storage? What about Deep Zoom from Photosynth (when can we get that for WPF?!) which is capable of handling (from various sources) Petabytes (1024 Terrabytes) of data? Oh yeah, Silverlight 2 is really starting to live up to the codename "WPF/E"!
I was toying with a WPF application yesterday, that I wanted to have online, and sure enough, I could copy the majority of the codebehind and UI, so very cool!
Silverlight 2 is much more exciting, a nice example of a few of the new technologies included in it can be found at the Hard Rock Memorabilia app.
I'm not sure if xBlend 2.5 was announced recently, but I happened to see it in one of the slides from the Mix08 keynote, thanks to Long.
Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview supports Silverlight 2 Beta 1, and SL2B1 has a lot more WPF UI Elements in it. For me, this is really exciting, because I really didn't want to be creating buttons, list boxes, etc. If I'm going to create a control, it isn't going to be a 'fundamental' control. Before now, Silverlight 1.1/2 to me was awesome, but pointlessly tedious to develop.
Apart from that exciting news, Expression Studio 2 Beta has been released! The biggest thing that stands out for me is xWeb2 now has PHP Support! That's a huge step in the right direction, and seemed to be one of the biggest complaints at Remix last year.
A long time ago I tried making a MSN Messenger (/Windows Live Messenger) service client, using WPF. This was certainly fuelled when Yahoo announced their WPF client for Yahoo's IM Network. Unfortunately, my C# skills at the time certainly did not extend to making a library capable of connecting to MSNP reliably, particularly the later and more interesting versions (ie, v11+). I turned to the MSNPSharp library (which is based on DotMSN), but unfortunately I had difficulty following the logic of it (different authors between MSNPSharp and DotMSN I believe led to some inconsistencies in the code), and with no documentation, I eventually abandoned the project.
The above picture is actually 'live', connected to WLM. Sending/Receiving messages works fine, its just any other automated data that usually crashes it out. Display Pictures worked at one stage, but only from the official client, not Trillian and the like.
Over the past few days/weeks, I was toying with making my own Twitter client like Will, and he suggested a really cool idea of using the 'instant notification' method (rather than scraping 70 times/hour) by connecting via XMPP (GTalk).
To understand the Jabber-Net library, I've sort of blown it more into a Jabber client than just a small addition to my twitter client, named Wabber. It currently only connects to Google's Gmail/GTalk server (hard coded for simplicity), so you'll need an account to get started.
Features
To Do for vNext
Download
(Source to follow, need to add documentation, and more importantly, error handling)
In my previous post about WPF Performance, I blasted the poor performance associated with transparency being enabled. The 'solution' was to force software mode, although there were statements suggesting this would be fixed in .NET 3.0 SP1, .NET 3.5, or Vista SP1.
The first two I'd tried to no avail, and only recently have I tried the third (Vista SP1)…and the results are very promising. The animations speeds are 'back to normal', with little to no noticeable difference between transparency being enabled or disabled (in terms of performance, obviously I'm noticing the transparency). Firing up WPFPerf shows that it never fell below 40FPS, a huge improvement!
Kudos on the performance increase, hopefully when Vista SP1 becomes mainstream WPF will no longer be overlooked because of performance issues!
