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.
Tuesday, Nov 30, 2004, 8:40 AM in .NET
The 7 Goals of Highly Effective XAML Designers
Rob Relyea, a Lead PM on the Avalon team, has posted the 7 goals that drives the XAML design decisions.
Monday, Nov 29, 2004, 6:01 PM
Sioux Falls, SD Geek Dinner Starting
Rod Paddock is starting up a Geek Dinner for Sioux Falls, South Dakota and asked that I slobber a little Sells juice on it. Consider yourself sauced, Rod.
Saturday, Nov 27, 2004, 9:26 PM in .NET
Microsoft's Road Map for Windows Forms and Avalon
John Montgomery, Microsoft Marketing Maven in charge of .NET and WinFX messaging, has posted the road map agreed on by the Windows Forms and Avalon teams about which UI stack to use and when (an excerpt is presented here):
"Microsoft's roadmap for client UI development has three main phases:
- "Today, use Windows Forms v1.1 and observe the Microsoft Patterns and Practices guidance for maintaining clean separation between UI and other application logic.
- "When Avalon v1.0 releases (scheduled for mid-2006), we recommend that applications looking to differentiate their user interface such as Web sites and graphically intensive applications such as complex data visualization look closely at Avalon. Other applications should continue using Windows Forms.
- "Following the release of Avalon 1.0, the next version of Visual Studio following Visual Studio 2005 will contain tools and designers to support Avalon. At this point, customers should start to move their new development efforts to Avalon and use the Windows Forms/Avalon interoperability features."
Saturday, Nov 27, 2004, 8:04 PM in .NET
More Peer Pressure for Ian...
I really wish Ian would port his TopDraw sample to the Avalon CTP...
Friday, Nov 26, 2004, 1:58 PM in .NET
DirectX Mesh (.x) to XAML Converter Update for CTP
Ian gives into peer pressure (I love the Internet : ) and posts an update to his DirectX mesh (.x) files to XAML conversion tool that works with the Avalon CTP.
Now that we have an Avalon that works with WinXP and VS05, what's holding you back?
Friday, Nov 26, 2004, 10:45 AM in The Spout
Hurray for IE QA!
"It appears that the overall quality of code, and more importantly, the amount of QA, on various browsers touted as 'secure', is not up to par with MSIE; the type of a test I performed requires no human interaction and involves nearly no effort. Only MSIE appears to be able to consistently handle [*] malformed input well, suggesting this is the only program that underwent rudimentary security QA testing with a similar fuzz utility.
"This is of course not to say MSIE is more secure; it does have a number of problems, mostly related to its security architecture and various features absent in other browsers. But the quality of core code appears to be far better than of its 'secure' competitors.
"[*] Over the course of about 2 hours; I cannot rule out it would exhibit problems in a longer run."
Friday, Nov 26, 2004, 10:34 AM in .NET
Some Love for the Smart Client Offline App. Block
Richard Childress has posted on his experiences with the Smart Client Offline Application Block as valuable for not only solving his domain-specific problem, but also in getting .NET to be used at all:
"Working in IT, where we try to only write code that helps run our business, it's a Great Thing when you don't have to write plumbing code. Writing a class here and another class there, while leveraging a big chunk of code that we didn't write to solve a problem, is golden. This block, itself, is actually helping drive the case for starting to incorporate the framework into our app(s). The value is unquestionable."
Thursday, Nov 25, 2004, 7:37 AM in .NET
Useful Avalon Application: Pong
As cool as XamlPad and Bouncing Boing Ball are, I've had at least one blog comment from someone looking for a useful Avalon CTP application (something not targeted at developers, I'm guessing). Well look no more, because we have Pong! What more use can we expect from our computers than that?!? : )
Thursday, Nov 25, 2004, 7:34 AM in The Spout
Microsoft Amnesty for Software Pirates
Wow. This is nice of us...
Wednesday, Nov 24, 2004, 4:17 PM in .NET
Interactive Programming Addiction
So, I've never done anything with Python, so I've never really figured out what the big deal was. However, if the interactive Python development environment is anything like the experience of XamlPad, I'm glad I haven't tried it, otherwise I'd never be able to go back.
Oh my god, that interactive model is wonderful! I sat down this afternoon to port my Longhorn Solitaire code to the Avalon CTP and had to completely re-write my GridPanel layout code to use the new Grid because the GridPanel is deprecated. However, I didn't know a thing about the Grid, so found a great little Grid sample from the WinFX SDK and started the latest version of XamlPad and taught myself how to use the Grid interactively.
Every time I added an element or attribute, I saw the results in real-time. If I screwed up the syntax, I got a red error message in the status bar. I can't tell you how much pleasure I got adding <ColumnDefinition> and <RowDefinition> elements and setting the Grid.Row and Grid.Column attributes on my cell elements, watching things move around the screen and figuring out Grid the content model. It was fabulous! All development should be like this...
Wednesday, Nov 24, 2004, 11:39 AM in .NET
Channel9: Way Cool Visual C# Express Demo
It's amazing to me how much stuff they've packed into Visual C# Express. In this Channel9 demo from Dan Fernandez, I learned about a ton of VS05 features that I didn't know about. I hope they all work from the non-Express product...
Wednesday, Nov 24, 2004, 8:03 AM in .NET
Getting to the Avalon Visual Tree
It's a common Avalon question: how does XAML get translated into an Avalon visual tree, i.e. the set of Avalon objects? In this post, Zhanbo Sun, an SDE/T on the Avalon team, not only shows an example of this translation, but provides the code so that you can see it for yourself. Maybe Chris Anderson will add this feature to XamlPad so that you can see it interactively or maybe Gaston Milano will add it to his VS XAML Viewer so that you can see it inside of Visual Studio... [hint, hint]
Wednesday, Nov 24, 2004, 7:41 AM in .NET
XAML Viewer for Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1
As cool as Chris Anderson's XamlPad sample is, I think Gaston "I'm a VS man" Milano has done him one better with a XAML viewer integrated directly into Visual Studio 2005 beta 1. Wahoo!
Tuesday, Nov 23, 2004, 4:38 PM in .NET
Avalon CTP Sample: 3D Animation Studio
Karsten has updated his 3D animation play toy to the Avalon CTP.
Tuesday, Nov 23, 2004, 8:36 AM in .NET
Avalon + WinForms Sitting In A Tree...
Chris Anderson has posted two samples of Avalon and Windows Forms integration (a simple one and a more complicated one). Both are presented in a form that's easy to use with his ClickOnce XamlPad Clone. Enjoy.