MarkItUp

This afternoon I flew back to Canberra from Melbourne and was seated next to a lady right up at the back of the plane.  We both started out reading the Qantas in-flight magazine and when I finished she noted that there wasn't really anything terribly exciting in there this month - we both agreed on that point!  I then mentioned to her that I was planning to read the New York Times once we were in the air.  Once we were in the air and the seatbelt sign when off I immediately pulled out my new Tablet, folded the screen over, and started up my NYT Reader.

This is a perfect reading experience and you can even annotate articles with notes - using both text and Ink - of your own.

My fellow traveller was totally amazed by how friendly the application was to use.

If you haven't yet downloaded and used NYT Reader... go do it immediately! 

To download the Times Reader, click here.

I was chatting with Mitch yesterday about how users might interact with rich media types (audio, video, pictures, etc) in a WPF world and then this morning I came across this great new Channel 9 video: 

Link to Daniel Lehenbauer and Kurt Berglund: Interactive 2D controls on WPF 3D Surfaces

In the video, members of the WPF team are showing off a feature that they've added to allow much richer interactions with 3D objects.

This image is taken from the video and shows a context menu attached to a 3D Virtual Earth globe - which itself sits above a set of photos which are databound to a 3D carousel.  This video has to be seen to be believed!  Just for starters, imagine the implications of this technology on something like learning software.

Joseph has been busy getting the skin for his new website ready and now it's there for the whole world to see:  http://LearnWPF.com

I've recently ordered the WPF book that was written by Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths so I'm hoping to start adding articles to the "How to" section of LearnWPF very soon.  If you are interested in writing WPF articles then shoot Joseph an e-mail.

Good luck Joseph!

Programming Office Applications Using C#
Discusses the tips-n-tricks for coding VSTO apps using C#.

Understanding the Excel Object Model from a Visual Studio 2005 Developer's Perspective
Discusses the nature of the major objects within the Excel Object Model

I just returned from the MVP Summit yesterday and, whilst it was generally fairly low-key in comparison to other trips that I've had to the "big-house", it was none less enlightening. The key things that I learnt this time around were that, if you've been avoiding learning WPF, WCF and Vista then now is the time to pull your head out from underneath the covers.

Mitch finally got me to start looking at these technologies and I can easily see why he's genuinely excited about them. Vista promises a user-experience that is second to none while it seems that WPF is probably going to be the first really significant shift in the Windows UI in 15 or so years.

I'm planning to keep my eyes open for the next Vista drops and also the initial release of Sparkle so that I can finally start to build some XAML-backed WPF applications.

UPDATE[1]: Next time I need to read the "friendly" manual before saying that something isn't working.  Everything is now working as expected!

UPDATE: I downloaded the LINQ preview and installed it.  It actually installed real quick with no reported errors.  The LINQ-Preview templates didn't show up so I went and copied them into my default templates folder.  I opened up VS and copied some LINQ code into the a code file, pressed compile and received an error stating that: "System.Array does not contain a definition for WHERE".  Sorry LINQ... you promised so much. 

I've posted this question to the LINQ forum so hopefully there will be a response soon: http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=90075

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114680

In this video Anders shows how to use LINQ and also explains some of the implementation that make it possible at a language and CLR-level such as: Extension Methods (lambda-like functions) and Anonymous Types.   I'll be interested to have a play with the samples to get a better understanding of how I'd implement some of this stuff. 

The possibilites behind Extension Methods seem very exciting to me and they are a very powerful concept. 

Having just written a filesystem data provider (for SUB) I know what's involved in working with data outside of the database.  Stop and think about where we get data from these days - WinFS, XML, etc - and you start to realize how cool it would be to have data model unification across each of these things.

I think that one obvious area that will benefit from this in the future is for writing strongly typed queries in the database using managed code but, as Dan Fernandez points out in the video, being able to run LINQ over any enumerable data means that the power of database queries can now be brought to a whole range of things such as querying the registry keys or other interesting things such as querying controls on a User Interface... think about that for a while!

Also, the other day, Joseph talked about his first impressions of XLinq which sounds as though it is an XML-specific flavour of LINQ:

    http://jcooney.net/archive/2005/09/13/6731.aspx

This week I'm in Melbourne attending our Industrial Strength .NET course.  One of the modules that we did today was the Deployment module where we looked at the various ways that you can depoly your windows apps, ie: XCOPY, .msi, href and bootstrap.  In the lab for this course we wrote a small bootstrap application which used an EntLib configured Update block to do the work. 

After running the labs we took a look at ClickOnce to see how it will work in the future and compare the differences with what you can achieve now - such as security related behaviour etc.  Now, I know that this really exposes me but, up until now I've been pretty happy just watching the ClickOnce demo's and figured that there's not really much to know about the topic but today, trying it out I realized that there is a lot of magic that I really don't understand.

For example, when you deploy an application via ClickOnce you are presented with an browser containing a link to start the application.  The page that opened was in an IE browser, I clicked the link and it worked fine.  When I decided to see what happens when you open that page from a Firefox browser I got a different behaviour and actually experienced errors.  I wonder whether VisualStudio always explicitly uses the IE application when it fires off that process?

Secondly, I started to wonder where ClickOnce "installs" the applications to when you run it.  For example, where in the filesystem does the .exe and other related application files live?  When you install, ClickOnce adds a link to the application to the Start|All Programs|Machine User link on your Start bar.  If you follow this link through you will see that it points to a "prefetch" file in your prefetch folder.  If you delete the prefetch files for the ClickOnce files you will see that the next time you launch the application from the shortcut that it needs to pull the app down from the web again. 

I'm sure that you can probably configure ClickOnce to store the program files into other, known locations - such as Program Files - but this excercise has pointed out to me that I probably need to play with it a bit more :-)