Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'wpf'

Teitlebaum's WPF Graphic Demos, Part 1

Adam Kinney — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:38:00 GMT

Back in May during the excitement of WPF 3.5 SP1 Beta, known on Channel 9 as WPFWeek, we posted the video entitled WPF 3.5 SP1 Graphics with David Teitlebaum. David walked us through some stunning demos of what the improved performance, HLSL and DirectX support in WPF 3.5 could produce. The demos were a hit and now to celebrate the release of WPF 3.5 SP1, I'll posting the code for the demos.

Now to give credit where its due, these were written by David, I just spent the time to clean them up a bit and make them more digestible. This has also been a good refresher for me, as I have a few ideas for WPF 3D in the works.

Below are the first two demos available:

ClothTextbox

The ClothTextbox or more correctly the example of an Interactive 2D RichTextbox on a 3D surface demo is an interesting concept. Brush over, type, push or pull the cloth-like surface with your mouse and watch it ripple and react all the while checking for spelling errors.

Layered Orb

An application made up of dynamically generated 3D objects with full interactive and pixel precise interaction. That means if you click between the shapes, you're actually clicking the desktop surface or application behind the Layered Orb application.

If you've been working on similar concepts with the improved WPF graphics capabilities I'd love to hear about it, or better yet see it!

The Continuum Show - Essential Editions

Adam Kinney — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:55:00 GMT

Episode 1 of the new show is an 18 minute interview with Phil Haack discussing ASP.NET MVC. This can be a lot of fun to watch, especially if you are a fan of ASP.NET MVC or Phil Haack.

But what if you don't already know about the topics at hand? Would you continue to watch the video for 3 minutes and 38 second when the question is finally asked "What is MVC"?

Probably Not.

This is where the concept of the "Essential Edition" comes in. In order to make the video easier to watch by more people, I'll be extracting out the "Essential" bits into a much shorter video.

After extracting out the tastiest most informative morsels from this video, the end result is a crisp 2 minutes and 41 second interview. You can now find out what MVC is, what's new in Preview 4 and how to find out more information in the time it takes to eat lunch at your desk.

I'll be posting The Continuum Show - Essential Editions on a new YouTube channel and on the TCS Facebook page. For a sample, check out MVC Preview 4 - Essential Edition.

Enter The Continuum Show

Adam Kinney — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:06:00 GMT

The Continuum Show has begun!

In this new show on Channel 9, we'll be exploring the world of the Microsoft Client Continuum. The Continuum refers to the array of UI technologies available form Microsoft including WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET, IE8,Windows 7, Surface and more.

We'll be showing new features, patterns and practices from experts and samples of awesome applications. There's a lot of stories that don't always make it out to everyone and I'm excited to be presenting those stories with the new show.

Episode 0 - Hello World and Episode 1 - MVC Preview with Phil Haack have already been published and I have a few more in stock waiting to be published. Some of the episodes already filmed include the NBC Olympics site, Kaxaml and a Facebook application built with ASP.NET and Silverlight.

If you have any suggestions for topics or applications you would like to see covered leave a comment.

To stay tuned to the Continuum Show you can follow along on Twitter, join the room on FriendFeed or become a fan on Facebook.

Now back to the editing room...

Robby steps up the game with nerdplusart

Adam Kinney — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:50:00 GMT

Robby Ingebretson has stepped up the game with his new blog nerdplusart. Not only does the new site use a sweet Silverlight app for the homepage (with custom blur effect!) but its functional too. It cleverly provides his latest twitter and song choice along with links to more content.

If you don't know Robby, you can hear him talk about designers, developers and integrators on Channel 9, which is a discussion about the work he does as an integrator and the future of the role in software dev.

The site name is not an homage to the new Microsoft Art & Technology site like you might think (ok, we hope you think). Its an original term from a MIX08 session titled Nerd+Art given by Robby and Nathan Dunlap.

And if Robby's name is still not ringing bell, one word. Kaxaml.

Custom Shader Effect Tutorial for WPF

Adam Kinney — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:43:00 GMT

After all of the interest shown in the WPF 3.5 SP1 graphics video, I was planning on writing a tutorial showing how to create your own simple custom effect. Noe need.

Instead, I will point you to Anders Bursjöö Grayscale Effect tutorial. Anders walks step by step through the process of creating the shader in HLSL, the C# effect class and then implementing the effect in a WPF application.

Nicely done Anders!

For more, Effects goodness, go straight to the source on Greg Schechter's blog. He's maintaining a list of GPU-based Effects posts which also show how to write custom Effects and explain more detail on how they work.

WPF 3.5 SP1 Beta release results in WPF Week on Channel 9

Adam Kinney — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:18:00 GMT

With the release of WPF 3.5 SP1 Beta, many have written comprehensive text on the subject:

Introducing the Third Major Release of Windows Presentation Foundation - Tim Sneath
Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta - Scott Guthrie
VS2008 and .Net 3.5 SP1 Beta - Should You Fear This Release? - Scott Hanselman

I was given the task of telling the story via videos posted on Channel 9. After drafting Dr. Sneath to aid with a few of the interviews and a fair bit of editing, we've come up with another round of WPF Week on Channel 9.

Please feel free to copy and past the image on your own blog.

If you haven't looked at WPF much before now is the time to do it. Granted I'm a graphics guy and this release has some major new improvements and features in that area, but overall this looks like an awesome release for WPF. Congratulations WPF team!

WPF Week Schedule:

Monday: Overview, Graphics
Tuesday: Client Deployment
Wednesday: Performance
Thursday: Application Model
Friday: Tools

WPF 3.5 SP1 Download links:

Mindscape's WPF Property Grid

Adam Kinney — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:41:00 GMT

Mindscape recently announced the release of their WPF Property Grid.

The Mindscape WPF Property Grid is a 100% WPF component for browsing and editing object properties. Use the WPF Property Grid to rapidly add features such as user configuration, preference editing and domain-specific designers to your application without sacrificing the visual flexibility of Windows Presentation Foundation.

When I looked at some of the screenshots, I quickly flashed back to the long days as a consultant creating LOB apps in Windows Forms. (Erik knows what I'm talking about)

This looks like it would have been very useful when creating those Master/Detail editing type of applications. I especially liked the Manuscript Browser screenshot. I think its just because the caption reads "A classic rendering of the WPF Property Grid." while behind the Grid is a rendering of a classic painting.

Silverlight 1.0 Fire Starter video site is now live

Adam Kinney — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:53:00 GMT

On November 29th 2007, a group of people gathered together to study Silverlight. "What is it, really?", "What can I do with it today?" and "There really is more than just a Media?" were all questions answered that day. Video and audio of the event has been captured on the Silverlight 1.0 Fire Starter video site, a newly inducted member of the MIX University.

You can stream the videos directly within the site or you can download the sessions in video and audio format.

The session titles are as follows:

An Introduction to Silverlight - Mithun Dhar
Getting Started Programming Silverlight - Jesse Liberty
Workflow of Silverlight with Expression and Visual Studio - Arturo Toledo
Silverlight XAML - Laurence Moroney
A Development Story - Adam Kinney
Media, Markers and More - Ernie Booth
Popfly and Silverlight - Adam Nathan
Silverlight in the Future - Ernie Booth

As an added bonus, if you like the design or interactivity of the site feel free to grab the source code. The code is not been specially prepared for review, but the code managing the HTML and Silverlight integration may be particularly interesting.

Enjoy the content and thanks to all of the attendees who showed up and really made the event a fun time!

Designers, Developers and Integrators on Ch9

Adam Kinney — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:42:00 GMT

Robby Ingebretsen stopped by on Halloween last week to not only discuss the holiday of tricks and treats but also the interesting story behind designers, developers and integrators. Robby has done a lot of thinking and work in this space, especially since joining Identity Mine where his actual job title is "Integrator".

Our discussion in the video covers the workflow between the three roles and how Expression Blend fits in to the mix.

I'm really interested in having more discussions like this, especially how this role is now more pronounced with the attention to User Experience in software apps. And in the MS world due to new technologies like WPF and Silverlight.

Silverlightsaber

Adam Kinney — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:13:00 GMT

The ZamDes user group just had their first meeting and I found this in their slides:

Impressive. Most impressive.

ZamDes a new WPF and Silverlight user group

Adam Kinney — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 08:41:00 GMT

A new Wellington NZ based user group focused on WPF and Silverlight for designers will be holding their first meeting on Thursday the 13th of September. This is awesome to see. Now if only Wellington wasn't so far from here, I'd stop by :)

From their about section:

If you want to join ZamDes you can email Nas with your name and email address or leave us a comment. Our monthly meetings are scheduled to start in mid September, the first session will be an informal introduction to WPF and Silverlight and info on how it can be used by designers to produce functional, visually rich frontends for web and client applications (and all without writing managed code!).
We’re still finalising the exact dates and locations as we’re keen to keep the venue and frequency consistent. We also have heaps of cool events in the pipeline, including a remote presentation from Lee Brimelow (frog Design, USA), the latest info from major MSFT events, and celebrations to coincide with major industry events and technology releases. And of course they’ll be loads of time to drink, eat and just chill out.

WPF Design Surface Beta 2 Screencasts

Adam Kinney — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 07:02:00 GMT

Today I posted two screencasts, created by Jaime Rodriguez, on Channel 9. Its a short two part series which provides an overview of "Cider", the WPF Designer surface, included in the recently launched Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. In the first video, I was really impressed with the control visualizations and navigation. WPF is a very full-featured UI framework which offers a lot of opportunity to create some unique and useful tools within the design surface. In the second video, Jaime runs the tools gamut from Expression Design to Blend to Visual Studio, showing a bit of the workflow possibilities there.

Part 1: Cider Beta 2 : Feature walkthrough

Part 2: Cider Beta 2 : Styling a WPF application with Blend and Cider

Flotzam mashing up Twitter, Facebook and Flickr in WPF

Adam Kinney — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:11:00 GMT

In a recent Channel 9 video, Charles interviews Karsten Januszewski and Tim Aidlin about Flotzam.

Take a spoonful of Twitter, add some Flickr and a dash of Facebook, optionally flavoring to you own taste with custom RSS support and you have an application that doubles as a screensaver flowing data on and off your screen. Better yet, remix the app by grabbing the source code and customize the whole experience.

Kartsen and Tim talk about their development experience especially focusing on the flow of between designer and developer. Tim designed the elements within Blend, handed them off to Karsten who would then write the C# code which reach out and grab the disparate data and display it leveraging Databinding.

Not only is the application mashing-up data, its built on foundation of mashed up code, including libraries such as, Facebook.NET, Flickr.NET and Karsten's own Twitter API built in 4.5 seconds.

Karsten blogged about his experience here, but I would expect to see more from him about the Designer/Developer workflow in the future.

My new job

Adam Kinney — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 22:30:00 GMT

Two years ago on this very date of June 20th, I started my first day here at Microsoft. It was an exciting day, it was just new employee orientation, but it was my first job in a technical company with more than 20 employees. I was hired on to become the newest web developer on the coolest Microsoft site known as Channel 9. My manager was Jeff Sandquist and my teammates were Charles Torre and Robert Scoble.

A lot has happened since then.

In 2005:

Aug 25th - Ch9 welcomed a new design
Sep 13th - PDC2005 - debut of the inflatable 9 guy
Sep 13th - MicrosoftGadgets launches as a blog
Oct 13th - Clipster was launched on Ch9
Oct 26th - Erik Porter joins the Ch9 team
Nov 1st - MicrosoftGadgets gains forums and a gallery
Dec 2nd - Shows are added to Ch9
Dec 22nd - MicrosoftGadgets gains user tagging and Ajax interface

In 2006

Jan 18th - Duncan Mackenzie joins the team
Mar 13th - Channel 10 goes live
Mar 21st - MIX06 happens
Apr 20th - Channel 10 party in Second Life
May 4th - Channel 10 is redesigned and adds new features
Jun 1st - Starbucks Interactive Cup Brewer appears in the break room
Jun 10th - Scoble announces he's leaving Microsoft
Jun 19th - Sampy joins the team
July 19th - Channel 10 gets a major update
Sep 21st - Ch10 update and we prep the code for multiple site usage
Sep 25th - Rory joins Ch9
Nov 6th - VisitMIX goes live
Nov 13th - The great Flat vs threaded debate on Ch9 culminates
Dec 4th - 9 Guy first appears in Silverlight

In 2007

Jan 3rd - VisitMIX update
Feb - I drew a lot on the whiteboard
Mar 9th - REMIX contest goes live
Mar 19th - SCRUM happens
Apr 23rd - David Shadle joins the team
Apr 30th - MIX07 happens
Jun 7th - Ch9 v4 beta goes live
Jun 20th - I announce my job

Now that we've gone through that short highlight reel, let me continue with the news. First off, no I am not leaving Microsoft. I am actually not even going that far. Same building and most likely same office for awhile.

I will be joining the Client Platform Evangelism Team led by Tim Sneath and my focus will be Silverlight and WPF. If you know anything about me, you know that I will be in heaven spending my days engrossed in these two technologies.

I would like to thank Jeff, Tim, Steve and Ray for their help in making this move smooth and possible.

Woo hoo!

MIX07: WPF Comics with Identity Mine

Adam Kinney — Tue, 01 May 2007 00:14:00 GMT

I just came from a session given by Nathan Dunlap and Robbie Ingebretsen entitled “ZAP!, WHAM!, KAPOW!”: WPF and the Next Genertion of Online Comic Book Reading. And yes, it was as awesome as it sounds like as it should be. They presented an experimental WPF app designed to create a great on screen reading experience for comics.

I'm a fan of comics and enhancing reading experiences especially online, and this type of conceptually was similar to something Ernie Booth and I had dreamed up. Immediate improvements include a visual index of pages which you can use to navigate and preview, different display modes depending on the context of the display currently used and an authoring environment allow content creators to author a very rich path of navigation through the content. They did mention that the Sample should be available online soon once they have chance to clean it up for distribution.

A few technical items of note; each page that is presented can be a .jpg (they were using actual comic book pages from the 24 comic, 1000x2000 pixel images) or a xaml file. Once I heard that I thought "moving backgrounds!" (think DreamScene type movies). Which in due course, they demoed a cover page of their comic with a pulsating plasma-like image in the background. Nicely played Dunlap and Ingebretsen, nicely played. It was also interesting to see that they had chosen to use a Silverlight player within the WPF application to show their extra editor's clips.

Overall the two presented with excitement and obvious love for their science project. Both had previously worked at Microsoft building WPF and now they are both off apparently having a great time at Identity Mine. Towards the end they mentioned that their demo comic "Identity Men" had been actually printed (sure to be found on Flickr soon) and that they were releasing a collection of controls called Blendables, Nathan posted more here.

Great session guys, now I need to try and catch their next session Booyah! Designing and Developing Line-of-Business Applications That SIZZLE

Expression Studio for all MIX07 attendees

Adam Kinney — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 03:30:00 GMT

All MIX07 attendees will receive a Commemorative Edition of Expression Studio, that combined with receiving a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate and you're ready set up a fresh new pc for designing your WPF and WPF/E apps. Very nice. I used to go to a fair amount of conferences and I don't remember getting any kind of offer like that.

On a side note, we have the first couple of REMIXes published. There's Binary Haze, Licorice and my favorite so far Army Men.

WPF, where it came from and where its going

Adam Kinney — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 04:38:00 GMT

I watched this video straight through, full command of my attention. On Channel 9, Micheal Wallent tells the history of WPF and provides interesting information on its current incarnation and where its heading. I had actually heard a little of this at MIX06 during the Mix Chat at the WPF table, but this a clear account of how and why the team and project was formed. Since, my Longhornblogs/Xamlon days, I've been giving WPF sometime to simmer before digging into it. I've been so web focused, but its always been right there taunting, its a good pain, though. After listening to this though, I don't know how much more I'll be able to hold off before diving in.

I took notes throughout the whole video due to the steady flow of information. Rather than drop the notes for the whole video, I'm going to focus on the WPF/e comments, mirroring the my interest in that space. Atlas helps you build dynamic (like truly dynamic) cross-platform HTML applications. WPF provides for a stunning, hardware accelarated, legible without precedant, integration of documents, graphics media experience. But WPF/e is going to hit that nice sweet spot in the middle.

WPF/e Notes from the video:

a subset of WPF, missing heavy WPF features (hardware acceleration, 3d, deep flowing text)
it will run cross platform
open format, no license to publish to (Looking forward to the future tools)
a new codec for media "WMV + alpha" - run WMVs and WMAs cross platform (this is huge, especially noted after work done on 10)
can read XPS - (cross-platform documents!)
team goal is 3 releases within the next 18 months

Stoked, is my word for all of this.

What is WPF/E?

Adam Kinney — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 19:29:00 GMT

When I first saw "Avalon" back in 2003, I was stunned (Vector Graphics, Hardware Acceleration, Rich layout and Controls, etc...). But Avalon is a very rich client and I've always been a web-based developer at heart, so once I saw the short demo of WPF/E yesterday I flipped out again.

WPF/E stands for Windows Presentation Foundation "Everywhere", and the concept demonstrated was a subset of WPF where some richness (i.e. 3D, hardware accelration, Adaptive Documents) is given up for reach. Reach out to small devices and other platforms.

During the session we saw a WPF/E application running in IE (7+ supported), Safari, and on a PocketPC. One of the highlights was when they were navigating through the WPF/E app in IE and came upon an external link. The link was clicked and they navigated around a bit and then hit the Back button. And to my sheer joy, the state was held in the WPF/E app displaying the last place you had navigated. Try doing that in Flash.

So what makes a WPF/E application? To run on Safari you can't depend on the .NET Runtime, so it doesn't. You use XAML and JScript to create the application which is then interpreted by the the Hosting Control, in IE's case its an ActiveX Control, otherwise its Native to its environment.

That's all the info I have for now. WPF/E is still in the early stages, but from what I've seen, I'm very excited to see it come to life.