WPF Attached Events Addendum

Some of you may remember my article on attached events. There's now more clarification from the WPF SDK blog. Considering the extensive email exchange I had with Wolf Schmidt about the topic and its coverage in the SDK, I wouldn't be surprised if he had something to do with that article. An excerpt from our conversation is in order.

Now that I've spent so much time on an email to one individual customer, I think I smell a WPF SDK blog entry coming :-)

The point is, the MSDN people are very accessible and very helpful, and answer with passion and accuracy. And they hang on the WPF forum as well so don't hesitate to drop your questions there.

Technorati Tags: wpf, .net3, xaml

Service Pack on the way?

A while ago, Rob Relyea mentioned on the forums that they had someone working on community and bugs in the WPF team.

I also remember reading a few days ago a Microsoft blogger talking about a service pack.

And Neil has pointed out that bugs are starting to get closed down on the Connect site.

And now, another proof, in the form of a link list:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937134/en-us - 27th June
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937128/en-us - 8th June
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937130/en-us - 22nd June
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937106/en-us - 20th June
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937131/en-us - 19th June

Service pack may you come. And if other bugs could be fixed, including the dependency property journaling and persistence counter for user controls, that would be nice Microsoft :)

 

Technorati Tags: wpf, .net3, microsoft, xaml

Multiple mice and cursors on WPF applications

For those that want to do WPF development with multiple cursors, Microsoft released a new version of the MultiPoint SDK. 

Download details: Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Software Development Kit (SDK)

Technorati Tags: wpf multipoint mice

Knowing which aliases are defined

[Update: Replaced -eq by -match as suggested on the PowerShell blog. Thanks guys, humbling to have you reading this blog. Tagging really does have a use :) ]

One of the main struggles I have when writing my PowerShell scripts for public consumption is that I never remember which aliases I can use. And eventually I'd like to naturally type gci instead of ls, but old habits die hard.

Here's a little function I have in my profile to get the list of all aliases defined for a command.

function Get-AliasShortcut([string]$CommandName) {
    ls Alias: | ?{ $_.Definition -match $CommandName }
}
Set-Alias gas Get-AliasShortcut

Which you can then execute as such:

6# gas get-childitem

CommandType     Name                                                Definition
-----------     ----                                                ----------
Alias           gci                                                 Get-ChildItem
Alias           ls                                                  Get-ChildItem
Alias           dir                                                 Get-ChildItem

Technorati Tags: powershell

Stupid word of the day

Heard in a corridor.

This has great talkability.

Maybe that's why I'll always have trouble with marketing. Of course the simplest form I can think of,

This will make people talk.

doesn't have the same punch. Why remove the people from a marketing slang expression? Probably because marketing people prefer not to think they're manipulating (or is it influencing) humans.

When digital was about digits...

A blog post over on Satisfy me reminded me of the good old Compuserve days. Oh yes I was there, and 100530,3355 was my ID! That was back when the Internet wasn't that big mind you. But we had file transfers with resumable downloads, chat rooms, message boards, and a real sense of community.

But then the Internet arrived and I turned into technoboy@cis.compuserve.com (when alias email addresses were tested, and only the SysOps knew about them (oh the social status it was to be SysOp or even WyzOp! (and I promise to stop nesting braces.)))

And one of the first IM system on the Internet? ICQ of course, where I was 2931484 for years (and I believe that account is still alive).

Isn't it strange how years on (13 years for Compuserve, 11 for ICQ) I remember these numbers but have no memory of any of my passwords or previous email addresses.

Maybe the brain is better at numbers than we think. And maybe I miss the old time when the digital world was about digits.

xsd.exe passed away, svcutil.exe is the way to go

I was reading Darren David's blog entry on code generation from xsd files. Sadly, he references xsd.exe that generates Xml serialization code.

If you're using .net 3, the new kid on the block is svcutil.exe that will generate real DataContracts that will give you a smooth path to Indigo (hmmm, WCF).

Sadly, the documentation focuses mainly on generating the client code rather than the DataContract serialization code. There is one page detailing the process: Importing Schema to Generate Classes. Choose to not generate the client and only generate data contracts from your xsd schema and you'll be done, the v3 way.

Quickly know when you're in quirk mode

While debugging an application rendering issue yesterday (yes, I'm back to a bit of asp.net work, with CSS adapters and asp.net AJAX, oh the joy!) I came up with a very quick way to know when you're in quirk mode.

In the address bar, type the following:

javascript: window.alert(document.compatMode);

CSS1Compat means the browser is not in quirk mode.

Simple and efficient, but of course not with frames (which you shouldn't use anyway!)

eScrum

For fans of scrum, Microsoft released eScrum v1. Not had the time yet to investigate it but it looks good!

Validation in WPF with Enterprise Library

A very good news for those that require enterprise

Technorati Tags: WPF, .net3, winfx

quality validation, there's now a project to integrate WPF validation and Enterprise Library Validation Application Block.

Silverlight Predictions and WPF Snippets.

On a break from blogging at the moment, service will resume when my new MacBook Pro arrives (new resolution, faster CPU, nvidia chipset and 4gig of memory), and when I finally finish my move in central London. That said, my Silverlight predictions were accurate 100%, except I predicted a beta where both an RC and a CTP were released. And thanks to Brownie Points for enhancing my wpf snippets, although my blog is not notstatic.com and he forgot to give me credits. Hopefully he'll read the trackback and amend his entry. A lot could be said about the addition of UIPropertyMetadata against FrameworkPropertyMetadata. Rule of thumb if you're using WPF, unless you know the difference between the UIElement and the FrameworkElement levels, stick with the Framework layer. In this case, for WPF FrameworkPropertyMetadata is acceptable, for other toolkits only PropertyMetadata would be more accurate.