In case missed the news today, it is according to Microsoft that Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 will be released this month. The link to this news is here.
This is a major step forward for the WPF/XAML developers because the inclusion of “Cider” — The much improved visual layout and designer support inside Visual Studio. Hope the release of VS 2008 will drive the adoption rate of WPF and XAML-based markup systems higher.
I will report more on new and improved features in WPF 3.5 once I can get a final release copy of VS 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5.
As for the lack of recent updates on this blog, I’ve been busy working on some internal middle-ware framework that are no-less amazing than WPF. It is good to see the WPF and especially XAML is attracting more attentions from the development community, even the Java/Eclipse community. Take a look at the eFace XAML engine for Java/Eclipse, you will see that the mark-up and declarative programming methodology is making ways into more traditional development worlds.
This is also happening to the middle-ware applets I am working on now. From Spring.Net, Castle/Windsor, we see more development approaches that adopt the MVC pattern and declarative ways of doing and implementing things. WPF is no exception here.
I will update more when I have more inspirations to share, not only limited to WPF or XAML anymore
Visual brush in XAML is really easy and yet extremely powerful to use. Here I’ve included a list of examples I’ve gathered over the past few days. You may find them interesting
The latest articleby Xamlmoron.com shows some very interesting aspects of upsides and downsides of VisualBrush in WPF. I like the idea of using Visual Brush as the “Live Preview” window of larger screen resources you are rendering. This idea is very similar as the Live Preview we see in IE7 on Windows Vista, or the new Task Switcher on Windows Vista
A few weeks back I posted a WPF-based chart in my blog. Currently in one of my projects I need to deploy charts that support displaying multiple data series side-by-side and showing the value tick on the top similar as Google Finance charts does. So based on my previous WPF chart, I developed this “another chart” that can support multiple series. Here I also used the performance optimization with streamGeometry to enhance the chart memory consumption and response speed. I have to admit this chart is heavily inspired by the features in the Google Finance charts.
You can take a look at the final chart in action:
[Updated 8/4/2008]
The download link has been updated. CLick the following link to download the source code:
I was searching for a sample task pane implementation in WPF that I can use in one of my applications. What I was looking for is something that works similar as the mini task pane that exists in Windows XP Explorer.Originally I thought templating the Expander should be easy. But after couple of trials, I gave up and instead went the route to build my own composite User Control to completely customize the look and feel I need. It turned out building such task pane in XAML is fairly straightforward and not difficult at all. This again proves the “Power of Composition” in the design philosophy in WPF. The animation and the effects are pretty standard: ScaleTransform animation for the bottom panel and the RotateTransform animation on the header image icon when the expander is clicked. I really like WPF more and more comparing to the old days when I was working with Win Forms. This will be a non-trivial task if implemented in Windows Forms.
Here is the results of the mini task pane I’ve built.
Posted by ligao101 
Posted by ligao101 
Posted by ligao101 
