Martin Parry's Community Server

I've been catching up on my blog reading...interesting stuff I came across; PNRP in Windows 7 being used for "remote assistance". Sounds very cool. You can find a few PNRP examples on this blog if you search. Seadragon in AJAX from Live Labs - if you've seen DeepZoom in Silverlight then this is the same underlying technology (AFAIK) without the Silverlight part. Themes for WPF released on CodePlex ( a port of the Silverlight versions from the Silverlight Toolkit ). There's also a port of the ch... [read more]

Just a link but what a link! If you're interested in design-time extensibility for Silverlight controls then; this post is what you want.

I wanted to experiment with text animation. Specifically, I wanted a control that would display some text and have the option of "exploding" that text in the sense of taking each word in the text and randomly animating it in terms of; translation rotation scale opacity so that the words that make up the text can seem to "fly in" all at once to their final position on screen. Perhaps a UI will help; Here, my control is in the blue border occupying the bottom 3/4 of the window. Naturally, none ... [read more]

This post is a companion to a little article that I wrote for the UK MSDN Flash about Visual Studio 2010 with some resources to get you kick-started. It's not meant to be definitive. What? You don't read the MSDN Flash? Sign up. The first thing I'd say is that you need to take a look at this area on Channel9 and subscribe to it; http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio/ and also check out the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework V4.0 week here; http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Visual... [read more]

I'm not a big gamer. I hadn't turned my Xbox on for about 3 months before I recently bought Far Cry 2 which I'm playing through and really enjoying. I'm also thinking of Mirror's Edge as I played a preview of that and it looks really cool. However...today is the launch of the New Xbox Experience which looks pretty cool and has one particular feature that sounds very attractive to me - the ability to install a DVD based game to the hard-drive. I really want to try that out - with the best will in... [read more]

I don't really use Twitter but I'm surrounded by folks that do and I'm more and more aware of its impact as if you turn up to any kind of event or gathering these days then you'll know that someone will come along and say whether it's being reported well/badly in the various tweets that it's generating. Because of this, I wasn't aware of "Twistori" but Marc pointed it out to me the other week and said that it'd be cool if we had an internal application that did something similar that we could m... [read more]

Following on from the previous post, to get this work started I wanted to build a little library that supported what I wanted to do with the Twitter API. There's probably already a .NET library out there but I didn't search for it and my needs were fairly small and specific. The first thing that I wanted to do was to build a custom configuration file section to represent my configuration. In my configuration I wanted to be able to set; The language to use for searching twitter The set of searc... [read more]

Following on from my previous post, I wanted to create a WPF UI around what I'd done so far. I'll step through this one a little bit. Making a new project; adding a reference to my library for using twitter feeds; now I want my WPF Window to maximise itself on the screen and to be the topmost window so I'd play with settings to achieve that and change the Window title whilst I'm there (even if it's not displayed).<Window x:Class="BlogPostTwistori.Window1" xmlns="http://schemas.microso... [read more]

Following up on this post it's time to make the thing look a little bit better than it does right now. Some of this will be purely cosmetic, some of it will end up requiring some code changes. In the first instance, I'll go for some "cheap wins". I'll open up Expression Blend with my project and, first off, I'll go and grab a Windows-themed wallpaper from www.hdwallpapers.net (in the Computer section) such as this one; then I go to my project in Blend and add an existing item; and add that I... [read more]

Following on from the previous post I wanted to take the UI that I have so far; and attempt to style that ListBox over on the right hand side. The first thing I'd do with it is to remove its background; which stops it being a big white area of the screen. Then I altered its border to use a linear gradient brush. With that in place, I want to change the template for the CheckBox that is being displayed by the ListBox so I need to go and edit the ItemTemplate for the ListBox which I created in... [read more]

Following on from this previous post there's a few things wrong with where I've got to so far and some improvements that I'd like to make; I'd like to display something when there's no new feed items available. I'd like some kind of transition when one feed item moves to another. I'd like to avoid displaying an empty user control when the application starts up. That is, this doesn't look great; whilst I'm waiting for the first item to come in and, finally, There's a problem with images. I'... [read more]

Following on from the previous post I had one last thing that I wanted to do. At the moment, when my application moves from one feed item to another, it simply hides the UI displaying the feed item and then shows it again at a later point which is a bit "dull". It'd be nice if it did some kind of transition. I figured that I'd use the Shader Effect Library from CodePlex for this so I downloaded it and then added a reference to the ShaderEffectLibrary from my project; Now I can make use of an ... [read more]

My previous post around the location and sensor platform in Windows 7 came a little bit out of context so apologies for that although I have since watched the PDC session and it's well worth watching. However...if you want to start at the beginning with Windows 7 then there's the Developer Guide which you can download from here; Developer Guide and you should also make sure that you're subscribed to Yochay's blog which is up here; The Windows 7 Blog for Developers

One part of Windows 7 is the new capability for applications to be location and sensor aware. There are new standardised API's for an application to interact with location sensors in order to figure out where in the world the user is and there's also API's to determine things like; Ambient light Orientation There's a lot more detail up at the platform's home page up here; http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/sensors/default.mspx and then there's information up on the blogs here; http://blogs.... [read more]

Back in 2005/2006 I spent quite a lot of time going around introducing WPF at various conferences and user groups and companies and I haven't really done so much of that "introduction" type work since. I've done a bunch of stuff with WPF and a bunch of talks about its enhancements in V3.5 and V3.5 Sp1 but I've not had to go back and do an "intro" for a while. I did one today for a company and so I had to put some things together and I thought I'd share them here in case they're of any use to you... [read more]

I did a session on "Beyond Silverlight with WPF" down at the VBUG conference at Microsoft today. I still have "the PDC cough" and was feeling pretty terrible and so the session didn't go quite as I'd wanted it to in that I got distracted and let the time wander which is something I generally don't do. I blame the cough/cold but maybe I'm just getting old :-) I also wonder about the strength of; as I took one of those things last night and didn't wake up feeling too "alert" this morning. Anyway... [read more]

I don't know how they do it :-) but those guys at the Vista squad which meets up regularly in the Microsoft London offices have managed to secure Jason Zander for a meeting on the 19th of November. Jason is General Manager of the Visual Studio Developer Division here at Microsoft and he'll be talking about Visual Studio 2010. Click the image below to register and attend - I'd be there myself if I wasn't tied up at the other end of the country.

I'm back from the PDC with a cough - it occurred to me whilst there that a conference like PDC is an almost perfect mechanism for spreading a (human) virus and I noticed a lot more folks coughing as the week went on. If you've got "the PDC cough" then I empathise as I've got it too. The best sessions that I watched whilst at the PDC were (not in any particular order); Anders Hejlsberg on C# futures. Luca Bolognese on F#. Pablo Castro on ADO.NET Data Services online/offline. Rob Relyea (and comp... [read more]

I met a lot of old friends, colleagues and customers whilst at PDC - it's strange to me how easy it seems to be to bump into people in such a big crowd. "Hello" to everyone that I caught up with, good to see you :-) One of the comments I heard quite frequently was "Hey, there were a lot of UK companies up on the stage in the keynote" and, yes, there were :-) I was about to write them up when I realised Mike had already done it over here; Some Reflections on PDC 2008 so I'll link rather than cop... [read more]

Day 2 of the PDC keynotes was much more engaging and exciting for me than day 1. There's some very cool stuff around; Windows 7 WPF Silverlight Live Mesh VS 2010 Office 14 Well worth watching at; http://www.microsoftpdc.com and some of the Azure stuff became more "real" to me by having some people get up and write code against it rather than just using slides.

Available up here.

Localisation/Globalisation isn't my subject and it's a gnarly old topic so I generally leave it to folks like Guy who has a specific interest in that area, knows his onions and wrote the book! :-) However, a couple of things sparked my interest here. One was because a customer was asking me about it earlier this week and I hadn't really looked at it other than to expect it to work much like the regular .NET Framework. Then I saw Tim's post over here and that sparked more interest so I thought I... [read more]

Hey, I was going to write up Ray's session but, really, what's the point? No way I can make it better than you'll get by popping up here; http://www.microsoftpdc.com and watching it yourself.

Made it to the PDC - a journey that really began on Thursday as I was doing an event in London on the Friday and L.A. is a journey that has to start in London. It's nice to see sunshine again - forgotten what that looked like :-) Tomorrow is "Day Minus 1" with the pre-con sessions - I'm going along to the concurrency track. There's a site already up and running where you can follow progress; http://www.microsoftpdc.com/

Thanks to all the people who came to our re-run of the MSDN Roadshow that went around the country earlier in the year - this was a bunch of sessions on; ADO.NET Entity Framework and Data Services ASP.NET MVC, Dynamic Data and other enhancements in VS 2008 Sp1 Silverlight V2 Visual Studio Team System and happened in our London office today. My slides on Silverlight V2 are here for download in PPTX format - other formats will no appear on the post events site. A few questions that came up that ne... [read more]