You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.
Friday, Nov 11, 2005, 12:01 PM in .NET
WPF: Handling Button.Click or defining a command?
If I've got an Avalon Button, e.g.
<Button Content="OK" />
Should I give the button a name so I can handle the event (I would never put the event handler directly in the XAML) like this:
<Button Content="OK" x:Name="okButton" />
Or, should I define a custom command and invoke it like this:
<Button Content="OK" Command="local:MyDialog.OkCommand" />
Defining a command seems like overkill (you do some stuff in the static ctor and some other stuff in the instance ctor), but I like consistency, e.g. my main window's menu will use commands.
Thoughts on the best practice here?
Friday, Nov 4, 2005, 3:08 PM in .NET
WinFX in the BackRow
Casey Chesnum has put together what is probably the first real WinFX app: a Media Center "light" app that looks damn cool. Check it out.
Monday, Oct 24, 2005, 5:42 PM in .NET
WF Activity Context
Here. The one where I find more WF activity instances than I expect.
Monday, Oct 24, 2005, 5:40 PM in .NET
Typed WF Communications Details
Here.
The one where I finally figure out how to get wca integrated with my WF VS projects in a sane way.
Thursday, Oct 13, 2005, 1:56 PM in .NET
How is "workflow" different from "visual programming?"
Is there something intrinsic about "workflow" that needs to be surfaced to folks or would any visual programming language do? I'm not finding any commercial products in my web searches, but I know that there have been some "integrated component"-style programming languages where you lay flow and logic out from a set of components on a toolbox. Is Windows Workflow Foundation one of those that MS just happens to be doing or is there something important about "workflow" that interests folks?
Tuesday, Oct 11, 2005, 6:42 PM in .NET
What interests you about Windows Workflow Foundation?
The PDC was a buzz with folks praising WWF. Please tell me a) what you think is cool about WWF and b) how it will improve your life or the lives of your colleagues or customers. Thanks!
Sunday, Oct 9, 2005, 9:18 AM in .NET
John Gossman on Model/View/ViewModel
John Gossman, architect on the Sparkle team, has just made a post about how Sparkle uses data binding to hook up the view of the data to the data itself.
Interestingly, his post isn't about whether they used data binding -- that's a foregone conclusion. Data binding is so powerful that pretty much every non-trivial Avalon app will use it, and Sparkle (a large app with a very rich UI) uses the hell out of it.
The main thrust of the Model/View/ViewModel architecture seems to be that on top of the data ("the Model"), there's another layer of non-visual components ("the ViewModel") that map the concepts of the data more closely to the concepts of the view of the data ("the View"). It's the ViewModel that the View binds to, not the Model directly.
I've been a fan of value converters (implementations of IValueConverter) for this kind of work, but John's technique has its charms, not least that it allows for much more radical slicing and dicing than value converters allow easily.
Sunday, Sep 11, 2005, 6:26 PM in .NET
WinFX Hearts
To further drive home the point that I am not a graphic artist, Adam Nathan has posted his Avalon port of network Hearts. Wow.
Tuesday, Jul 12, 2005, 5:26 PM in .NET
Amazing XAML Tool: Adobe Illustrator -> XAML
Mike Swanson has posted an amazing Adobe Illustrator to XAML conversion tool. You have to check out the eye candy page to really see what Mike's been able to accomplish; it's not perfect, but it's damn good.
Sunday, May 29, 2005, 10:15 PM in .NET
IanG Builds a Real Magnifying Glass in Avalon
You've seen it in the concept videos, now see it for real: Ian has implemented a working magnifying glass in Avalon.
Monday, May 23, 2005, 10:45 AM in .NET
Avalon + Indigo Beta 1 Release Candidate
Today Microsoft has published the release candidate of Avalon and Indigo Beta 1. The most interesting features of this release over the CTP releases of the past is that these bits work on Visual Studio 2005 beta 2, both full and express. Enjoy!
Wednesday, May 11, 2005, 11:44 AM in .NET
More Better Avalon Sparklines
Sean Gerety has updated his Avalon sparklines implementation, producing good news, bad news and more good news:
- good news: the sparklines implementation fits nicely in with the other Avalon elements
- bad news: MSFT stock is dead, dead, dead
- good news: sparklines shows how dead MSFT is very nicely!
Wednesday, May 4, 2005, 3:17 AM in .NET
Animating Avalon Card Control Library
Monday, Apr 11, 2005, 9:05 PM in .NET
ZAM 3D: A 3D XAML Tool for Avalon
Wow. This looks really cool.
Friday, Apr 8, 2005, 5:18 PM in .NET
Indigo Software Design Review Online
Gene Webb, Microsoft developer evangelist, has posted the recorded LiveMeeting Indigo SDR (Software Design Review) dry-run videos and slides. And as if that weren't enough, you can see Steve Swartz, Indigo Architect, give an intro to Indigo on MSDN TV.
I remember a day when SDRs were deep, secret mojo that even folks that knew about them were special, let along actually attending them. Now, we're posting them on the internet. I love my company.