Entries Tagged 'WPF' ↓

I'm delighted to see that Infragistics have just released their NetAdvantage control set for WPF. It's a huge download: over 100MB, so either the controls are very big, the documentation is extremely verbose, or there are lots of samples included! This control set nicely fills the gaps in the capabilities currently provided by WPF, including a data grid, charting controls and an Office ribbon implementation that looks pixel-perfect to me.

Complex controls like an Office ribbon clearly benefit hugely from XAML. The ability to declaratively create nested collections really makes what would otherwise be a painstaking and error-prone task really easy. In the case of Infragistics' ribbon, you just declare a XamRibbon element that contains a RibbonTabItem that contains a ButtonGroup that contains the constituent buttons. It's almost self-documenting, because it so closely parallels the actual visual structure of the ribbon. Adjusting the visual theme of the ribbon is as easy as any other WPF project - just merge in a new resource dictionary containing the changes you want to make. We've recently released a ribbon ourselves as part of an MFC feature pack for C++ developers, but the difference in complexity ably demonstrates why WPF is such a powerful platform for building heavy-duty UI.

In the interest of fairness, I should also highlight some of the other great controls out there: Xceed have a great (free) data grid, ComponentOne also have a data grid and chart control, along with a bunch of calendaring components, DevComponents also have a very impressive Office ribbon and a Visual Studio-esque docking control, IdentityMine have a 3D carousel as part of their Blendables toolkit, and Actipro have yet another Office ribbon along with a wizard control.

Shamelessly stolen from the Infragistics product manager's blog, here's a screenshot that shows off the kind of application you can build very quickly with this control set:

Have you seen Flotzam? It's a fun mash-up that Karsten and Tim put together that aggregates a bunch of different data sources: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, YouTube and indeed any general RSS feed. You can install it either as an application or a screen saver, and it's a nice way to see what's going on out there on the "tubes". Karsten has coined the term panopticon to describe it (from the Greek, meaning all seeing); to me, this feels like it has the potential to form the first step of a project to build the ultimate, pluggable, modular social networking client.

Being a WPF application, Flotzam can be easily restyled. From the enter/exit transitions for new items to the overall visual look and feel of the Flotzam interface, you can do almost anything you want just by tweaking the XAML mark-up. And with MIX08 selling out quickly (hope you've registered), the team thought it would be fun to put together a little contest that gives you the chance to experiment with WPF by creating your own custom themes. We'll use the best entries at MIX, both on the keynote screens and on all the PCs around the show; Karsten hopes that walking around the show will be like visiting some kind of art installation with all these different skins appearing.

Entering the contest is easy: everything you need to know can be found on the visitmix site. We've even got screencasts available to show you exactly how to use Blend to do the customization. Let your inner artist out - show us what you're capable of!

Many of you have seen the New York Times reader application - it was featured as part of the portfolio I've been building up of Great WPF Applications. As I mentioned at the time, the New York Times reader is based on an SDK that we built to allow newspapers and content publishers to create rich, "occasionally-connected" experiences based on the flow layout capabilities in WPF. We've had a private beta program running for a while now, and over the intervening months there have been a number of other newspapers that have gone live with applications using this toolkit.

Now we're delighted to announce the public release of the reader toolkit on windowsclient.net. We've made a number of improvements to the kit to broaden its usage; the reader toolkit is now known by the rather more accurate but slightly less memorable name: the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit. This reflects its potential to go beyond a news reading scenario and handle other kinds of data synchronization and display needs. For example, you could use this as the basis of a client for financial data analysis, where the application downloaded stock prices and other financial information and presented it in a rich client experience (Lab49, are you listening?!)

The great thing about the starter kit is that the source code is available, so you can customize it to your heart's content: changing templates and styles, modifying the way it handles data, adding new features, and so on. We've also created a sample MSDN Magazine reader application built with the starter kit, which is of course also provided with full source code. Even if you're not interested in the reader toolkit itself, you'll find this a really useful application in its own right.

Have fun with this - I'm looking forward to seeing the applications people build with this toolkit...

Kapow! Shazam! Zing! Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet drove in hard with a right hook last week, referencing my recently-returned-from-hiatus series of great WPF applications and asking why Windows Vista didn't have more killer applications. As one of her correspondents notes, and even Wikipedia highlights, the notion of a killer application is both rare and perhaps something that is better observed in hindsight than at the time. Windows XP and Windows 2000 were both great successes, but I can't name any one application that was the tipping point for industry adoption of either.

From a development standpoint, the killer application is less relevant than the killer platform. This needs to strike the right balance between feature richness and ease of use, between power and flexibility, between ease of deployment and performance. Can you build an application that takes full advantage of your machine's hardware? Can you build an application that your customers love to use? Can you create faster, more feature-rich, less buggy software with fewer resources? My intention in writing this series is to try and highlight great applications that take advantage of WPF - the killer platform in Windows Vista!

Which brings us nicely on to one of the more amazing WPF applications that I've seen recently. This application came up in our team meeting today, and we were all noting that it's not had nearly the exposure it deserves. The application is the HP Interactive Canvas, built by Obscura Digital and Look or Feel for the Wall Street Journal D | All Things Digital conference held in May of this year. Created in just four weeks, this application takes full advantage of WPF to deliver a massive multi-touch interactive video experience. It's hard to do it justice with a couple of lines of text, so I'm going to break my usual moratorium on all things Google (!) and post this YouTube video that gives you a quick sense of the experience:

In the video above, you can see that multiple users are able to use their fingers to manipulate different objects on the screen: musical instruments, a photo and archive video collection, real-time stock symbols and charts. Obscura claim it is the world's largest multi-touch interactive video display. The application blends a high-resolution display with prototype hardware to bring the alleged Holy Grail of user experience to reality: the Minority Report interface.

Much of the work for this application was done by Darren David, a self-proclaimed "GUI geek" who was also responsible in large part for The North Face's in-store explorer application. He's got further videos and photos of the Interactive Canvas on his blog, which is also a great read on advanced WPF development. Keep an eye out for another similar application that he's going to be posting about in the next 24 hours too - another good reason to be subscribed to his blog.

Whenever we run a WPF or Silverlight training event or lab, the one question that is guaranteed to come up relates to the designer / developer workflow on a project team.

In the old days of Win32 or Windows Forms, the workflow was straightforward (albeit extremely limiting). A lot of desktop application development teams I've seen, particularly in the enterprise, don't even include a formal role for a user interface designer. Although the development team might include a business analyst or someone in a interface development role who would be doing some basic interaction design and application flow work, the actual interface would be mostly designed and implemented by the same programmer who was writing the underlying logic. On the other hand, for the projects where design was taken more seriously as a core element to the success of the application, the design and development teams were separated into different silos. The design team would often present their output in the form of a color printout of a screen designed with Photoshop in complete isolation from the actual tools or platform available, and the developer would then have to jump through hoops to painstakingly reproduce the design with tools that were never built for that purpose. The end-result was typically a disappointing compromise between the ideal that the designer had envisioned and what was practical with limited and stretched development resources.

WPF and Silverlight revolutionize that process by bringing the designer into the heart of the process. XAML becomes the shared substrate that can be used by both designers and developers to communicate their intent. Finally, the designer is not divorced from the development process: using a tool like Expression Blend to produce XAML, their artistry is no longer the inspiration for the final interface design, it is the final design. For the developer, they no longer have to waste time recreating controls that already exist in the toolbox simply because the designer has implemented a different visual representation; they can concentrate on the engineering challenges that will create the rich engine that powers the interface.

Such a transformation isn't without challenges, however: it requires new forms of collaboration, different project team structures, and an updated cookbook of best practices. We're keen to help you retool your workforce to take advantage of WPF and Silverlight, of course, and so Jaime Rodriguez and Karsten Januszewski have spent the last couple of months distilling their own experiences and interviewing early adopters into a new whitepaper that addresses many of these issues and opportunities in great depth. This is the first of a series of content on this and related topics; we hope to produce several more in the run-up to MIX08.

Read the whitepaper online or download a copy for offline reading or printing. What best practices would you suggest to a software house or enterprise embarking on a new WPF project? What else should we be covering with this series of whitepapers? Let us know what you think.

It's time for me to reboot this series that showcases great applications built on WPF. I left it on hiatus for some months because I felt that the point had been well made, but it's probably time to pick it up again, not least because there's a swathe of cool WPF applications out there that a lot of people probably aren't aware of. WPF is picking up steam and gaining growing respect from those who recognize the benefits of a modern UI framework built on top of a powerful runtime and operating system platform, as some of the future examples will demonstrate.

There could be no better way to restart the series than to highlight the WPF-based, Windows Vista-exploitative version of Yahoo! Messenger that was finally released into the wild today in the form of a preview release. It's been nearly a year since it was first announced, and Ryan Stewart wasn't the only one to wonder where it had got to.

The high-quality application experience starts from the moment you begin the download. The bootstrapper is only 200kb in size, so you're quickly into the setup routine. Something that really makes this stand out: Yahoo! Messenger is installed on a per-user basis, which means it does not require administrative privileges to install: instead, it places the application binaries into the correct area of the user's profile by default. This alone will get it installed in environments where no other IM client can reach.

Once you get it installed, the messaging client itself shows what a WPF application can do - from its subtle use of Aero Glass and custom control styling to the browser-style tab metaphor that allow you to have multiple conversations going simultaneously within a single window, it immediately dates every other IM client out there. You won't want to go back.

 
Perhaps the highlight, however, is the emoticons window (shown above). For most teenagers, this will be the killer feature. Although they are unlikely to care that they are animated, vector-based assets created as XAML, they'll love the way they pop out of the screen before shrinking back to normal size. Given that there's a thriving industry selling winks, avatars, custom emoticons and the like, this is guaranteed to be a hit with the younger generation.

For more information on the development story behind Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista, you're going to want to check out Eric Burke's blog. As one of the key guys behind this application, he's got some pretty good warts-and-all war stories to tell, and I'm looking forward to hearing the good and the bad over the coming weeks. Congratulations to Eric, Josh and the team, as well as to Karsten, who has been working behind the scenes to help them with answers to a bunch of tough questions.

The snow has arrived (here in Redmond, at least), and people are starting to wind down for the holidays. No doubt you're dreading the arrival of Aunt Mabel for an extended stay and are planning an opportunity to escape to a remote hideaway cave and finally get a chance to explore some new technologies!

Two groups want to capitalize on the extra free time you may have, and have announced a couple of pretty neat contests to which you might well want to pay attention.

First up is Lab49. I don't think I've written about this company before, but they're one of the hottest WPF development houses out there. Based in New York and London, they focus on the financial sector and have a very healthy business creating WPF applications that visualize complex data sets. Today they announced a WPF innovation contest with some awesome prizes including a top-notch Alienware developer workstation, two nights in New York, an Xbox 360 Elite, a signed T-shirt from the WPF team (I must get round to organizing that!), copies of Windows Vista Ultimate. The first 25 submissions will receive over $500 worth of prizes, and there's a $100 discount off Xceed's DataGrid for every single entrant. I particularly like the nature of this challenge; participants download a sample dataset from their servers and have to come up with an innovative visualization using WPF. It's great to have a focus, and they've picked a good one that will lead you to explore many powerful facets of WPF (animation, templates, graphics, dataset manipulation). This is a pretty sweet contest that will hopefully galvanize a few of you to spend more time learning WPF.

Secondly, INETA Europe (the International .NET Association) have launched a Silverlight contest that will be open to entrants from many European countries including UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. Again, there are some hot prizes including three tickets to MIX08, MSDN subscriptions and a number of books and developer tools. The parameters of this contest are significantly looser than the Lab49 contest - there aren't any specific objectives, but entries will be judged for originality, design, usability and technical execution.

Have fun out there - look forward to seeing some of the results. Now, about that T-shirt...