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.
Thursday, Feb 12, 2004, 8:26 AM in .NET
Rory's Tile Sample Uses Sidebar as It's Meant To
While Rory's virtual pet sidebar tile sample isn't especially useful for a corporate desktop (although maybe a "virtual employee" version could be used to screen potential managers before they're inflicted on unsuspecting "real" employees... : ), it does show off the intended usage for the sidebar: stuff that you absolutely, positively have to look at all day long.
As an example of what I mean, consider a typical example: the weather tile. Do you really need to know what the weather is all day long? Do you need to know it enough to take up valuable screen real estate to show it to you? I know I don't.
But, do you need to see a virtual pet all day long? You do if it's important enough to want to run it and keep it happy. Do you want to remember to flip to it all day long as an app running in the background? Nope. And that's why it's a perfect tile sample. If you run it at all, it's important enough to take up screen real estate all day long.
You can read about these and other interesting sidebar guidelines in the sidebar section of the Longhorn User Experience guide (still under construction, of course). If you've got any feedback, the UX team would *love* to hear it.
Wednesday, Feb 11, 2004, 2:07 PM in .NET
Kenny Linn on Intro Animation in XAML
Not only does Kenny show a cool little XAML animation sample, he does it in my favorite writing style.
I've always loved writers that start with something I'm familiar, in this case, a star defined in a hunk of XAML, and then build it up to add new features, in this case color, opacity, scale and rotation animations. The reason I love this style is that if I'm at a computer, I can follow along, folding the new features into my code and learning how things work by doing it. Or, if I'm reading the piece in the bathtub (which happens surprisingly often), I can build the code in my head (at least, 'til I get one of those cool waterproof military laptops).
Kenny's piece almost does that, but the initial showing of the <TransformCollection> is shown without context, so it's hard to know where it goes in the growing piece of XAML I was working on. Still, he follows it up a few sentences later with the entire XAML sample, so I can see the context. If he'd have been a little more explicit about the details of the animations he was applying and had wrapped it up with a summary, it would've been nearly perfect.
Oh, and animations in Avalon are cool, too. : )
Wednesday, Feb 11, 2004, 9:09 AM in .NET
Adam Kinney on Dynamic Animation in Avalon
Adam Kinney's at it again, this time with a sample of changing an Avalon object's animation properties dynamically to develop an interactive game-like effect. Very cool.
Tuesday, Feb 10, 2004, 5:25 PM in .NET
Longhorn Foghorn: A Journey of a Thousand Miles
"A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step."
Unknown (to me : )
In this installment of the Longhorn Foghorn, I start my Longhorn implementation of the venerable Windows Solitaire. There is no interesting code yet, but I have explored some of the same decisions any developer will face when starting their first Longhorn application from scratch. Enjoy.
Monday, Feb 9, 2004, 3:56 PM in .NET
Custom Avalon Spell-Checked TextBox Control
Ryan's at it again, this time with a custom Avalon control that adds spell-checking to the built in TextBox control.
Sunday, Feb 8, 2004, 11:15 PM
Hook into Windows Error Reporting
You know that dialog that comes up when an app crashes and asks you if you'd like to send the error report to MS? You probably know that MS uses this information extensively to track down issues with their own software. You probably don't know that as an ISV, you can sign up to retrieve this data for your own apps, provide custom error messages and/or resolutions to your customers that report these errors and even write code to put customized information into these errors. And, to the best of my knowledge, it don't cost nuthin'.
Sunday, Feb 8, 2004, 10:49 AM in .NET
Scoble Interviews on MS's Longhorn Search Plans
Here. Robert Scoble, Longhorn Evangelist at Microsoft, is interviewed on Microsoft' search engine plans, including those provided in Longhorn by WinFS. Take this with a grain of salt like all advance info on Longhorn, but interesting nonetheless.
Sunday, Feb 8, 2004, 10:24 AM
Carl Franklin interviewed by ChrisS and RoryB
A month or so back, Carl and I were hanging out and it occured to me that while Carl had been interviewing famous folks all over the place on his .NET Rocks Show, he hadn't been interviewed himself. So, Rory and I turned the tables on him. What results in Carl rambling on in pure bliss for almost two hours. Enjoy. : )
Friday, Feb 6, 2004, 3:59 PM in .NET
IanG on Rubber Band Selection Outlines in Avalon
Ian and I are writing an Avalon book for O'Reilly and Associates together, but he's way out in front of me, writing cool stuff like how to get rubber band selection outlines in Avalon. He also starts with a wonderful history of the XOR technique we used to use in Windows and why we no longer need it. In fact, we don't even need XOR in Windows Forms and GDI+ today, although lots of folks don't know that.
The key trick in Ian's implementation is putting a hidden <Rectangle> element into your XAML document so that when it's time to do the rubber hand outline, you can show it, move it and resize it based on where the mouse is, hiding the Rectangle again when the mouse button is released. This lets Avalon take care of the drawing, making this technique a thing of beauty.
Friday, Feb 6, 2004, 3:49 PM in .NET
Mitch Walker on Avalon Skinning
Here. Mitch Walker, the Terrarium guy at MS, posts some tantalizing screen shots from the Longhorn version of Terrarium under development and uses them to discuss the three steps to building skinning support into your Avalon apps. Thanks, Mitch, and when are we going to get Terrarium.Longhorn? : )
Friday, Feb 6, 2004, 3:33 PM in Interview
Interviewing for MS Interns
Shawn Morrissey (my boss) posted some questions he asked at UPenn's Wharton School of Business:
- Explain a database to a young child.
- Explain the Internet to your grandparents
- What is your favorite web site? Why? Now improve it.
- Steve Jobs calls and asks you to improve the iPod. Go. (No bonus points for saying, Add WMA support!)
- Youre in a boat with a rock, on a fresh-water lake. You throw the rock into the lake. With respect to the land, what happens to the level of the water in the lake goes up, goes down, stays the same?
He posted a couple of answers, but you'll have to read his post for them.
Friday, Feb 6, 2004, 11:23 AM
MS Allegiance Code Released to Fans
Apparently, even though Allegiance wasn't a commercial success for Microsoft, the fan base is very loyal. So loyal, in fact, that MS Research has posted the Allegiance source code to the community. I've never played Allegiance (or heard of it, for that matter), but the trailers on the Allegiance home page made it sound pretty cool. Even cooler is that MS couldn't keep working on the game, but didn't want to leave their fans in the lurch, so the released the source. Is this a thousand points of light or what!?! : )
Friday, Feb 6, 2004, 11:07 AM in .NET
Longhorn Concept Video: Health Care
Here. In this concept video, Carter Maslan, Longhorn evangelist, shows off secure, peer-to-peer networking using pub/sub in Indigo, Longhorn's identity management, organizing data using WinFS metadata relationships, using DRM to keep patient data confidential and some more ClickOnce s/w installation. The application itself shows off a specialist working remotely on a set of real x-rays showing a real case of a person incorrectly sent home having inhaled something he shouldn't and who could have really used a specialist on demand.
Friday, Feb 6, 2004, 8:55 AM in .NET
The Longhorn Team is Listening
As I've mentioned, the reason we're put the Longhorn preview bits out so early is so that we can get feedback at a time when things can still change. So, when you see Brad Abrams, Chris Anderson or any of the other dozens of MS PMs and Architects hanging out on the web ask for feedback on what they can do to make things better, take them up on it! Don't be shy. If you hate something, tell us so we can change it! If you love something, tell us so we don't change it!
Even if there isn't any specific blog entry to which you can reply, start or your or post something to the WinFX newsgroups. We've got members of the Longhorn team looking everywhere for your feedback. For example, yesterday Dino posted a theory he had about developer reaction to some particular aspect of the new Longhorn programming model. Rob Relyea saw that post and today he's soliciting more feedback on XAML compound property syntax and XAML as a whole, the latter specifically becase of Dino's post.
If you care enough about Longhorn to be running it at this stage, you really should take these guys up on their offers and use the newsgroups. And if you're afraid that you're not getting your feedback seen, drop me a line. I can't guanartee that your feedback will be incorporated, but I can make sure the right folks see it.
Friday, Feb 6, 2004, 8:36 AM in .NET
Design Considerations on XAML Syntax
Rob Relyea, a Lead PM on the Avalon team, talks about the chief design motivation for XAML, describes the current compound property syntax and then asks if developers would like it to change. Personally, I really like the current compound property syntax, especially given the choices, but Rob doesn't care what I think, he cares what you think. Go tell him.