The XmlDataProvider class enables Binding to XML inside XAML. This will allow you to bind e.g. to the rss feed of a blog like http://www.thomasclaudiushuber.com/blog/feed/, cause rss is simple XML.
A XmlDataProvider-Element is declared as a logic resource. You simply set the Source-Property to a XML-Document and optionally (more…)
I’ve waited about nearly one year for the Ibanez RG550 20th Anniversary (it’s my third guitar). The first time I got it, the pickup had a defective contact. The second time I got it, the pickup had still the same problem. Now I got it the third time (and that’s nearly after one year), and it works fine:
I’m really glad that this long running order process came to a good end, cause this is really a great guitar. For the last few days I have mostly played one of my favorite songs, Metallica’s cover version of Thin Lizzy’s "Whiskey in the Jar". And today I decided to write the first 2008-blog entry about my new guitar and rename my blog to ".NET Rocker" :-)
In many applications you want to fill up a ListView or a GridView with some data. In WPF applications you set the View-Property of the ListView to a GridView to show the data nicely in columns. In most cases you have an entity class (think of it as a "real" entity class or a DataRow as part of a DataTable), and objects (more…)
Wednesday at TechEd was another "linqy" day for me. In the morning I joined the session "LINQ to XML", with speaker Mike Taulty. With LINQ to XML there is a new XML-API as Part of .NET 3.5 which sits in the namespace System.Xml.Linq. LINQ to XML makes it easy to create (more…)
On the second day at TechEd, the first session I joined had the title "Cool Looking 3D visualizations with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)" (Speaker: Dennis Vroegop).
The WPF has a "built-in" 3D-API, and this session showed what you can do with 3D in your business applications. (more…)
Last week I went to Barcelona for five days, participating at TechEd Developers 2007 (05. – 09. november). In the following posts I’ll just show you a short summary of my experience at TechEd Developers 2007. Let’s start on Monday.
On Monday the Keynote-Session started after a life grafiti-show with some really breaking news presented by S. Somasegar (Microsofts Corporate Vice President of the developer division):
That are great news, especially the release of Visual Studio 2008 before the end of November. In fact Visual Studio 2008 really differs from the Visual Studio versions we had before. It’s the first time you can build applications that target different Framework Versions. With Visual Studio 2008 you can build applications that target .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0 or even .NET 3.5. This feature is called Multi-Targeting, and its possible, because .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 are all using the same Common Language Runtime, the CLR 2.0 that was introduced with .NET 2.0. Of course another great feature is the possibility to debug into the .NET Framework source code. A great possibility to learn some new best practices and to look how Microsoft has done it
The Microsoft Sync Framework is a new platform for enabling roaming, offline and collaboration across your applications, services and devices. The Framework also contains built-in support for synchronizing relational databases, NTFS and FAT file systems, etc. Get some more infos and the first CTP of it here.
After the Keynote-Session I joined the Session A Tour of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5, speaker Daniel Moth. Daniel explained that the .NET Framework 3.5 is a superset of .NET 3.0 (and so still uses the CLR 2.0). He showed some great features of the new IDE, like the new refactoring features added to the contextmenu in the codeeditor, or the transparency-feature for the intellisense-Window. You can make the intellisense-Window transparent by pressing the Ctrl-Key. So you can look at your code while leaving the intellisense-window open. Daniel also explained the terms of the green and red bits in a really good manner. Green bits are those assemblies that are new in .NET 3.5, and haven’t existed in .NET 3.0. Red bits are those assemblies that already existed in .NET 3.0, but are lightly extended and fixed with an installation of .NET 3.5. The Red bits are called “red”, because they describe a difficulty. If your .NET 3.0 application takes advantage of a not well implemented feature (maybe call it a bug :-)) in .NET 3.0 and that bug will be fixed with .NET 3.5, your application won’t work correctly anymore when you change this bug/feature by installing .NET 3.5. So microsoft has to be very careful with the red bits that are shipped as part of .NET 3.5. From the green and red bits you could also conclude something about the installation of .NET 3.5:
As the last session on Monday, I joined the session A Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Walkthrough using Visual Studio 2008, but it wasn’t really as amazing as I thought before. The only new stuff for me about WCF I got out of this session were the things that ship with Visual Studio 2008, but nothing about WCF itself. In Visual Studio 2008 there will be new Project-Templates to generate a WCF-Library and a new UI that allows you to test your services easily.
In the evening, the “Ask The Experts” was open. The first thing I was looking for was an “Ask The Experts to WPF”-stand. But I didn’t find one. There were stands with experts in Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server, BI, Office, Silverlight and Expression and many more, but no stand with experts in WPF. So I just went to the Silverlight stand and asked for the WPF stand. The guy pointed to another person and said: “He asked me exactly the same questions 10 seconds ago, unfortunately there is no stand with WPF-experts”. And the other person said, “Some questions about WPF?”. Yeah, I thought, here I was right. Looking at his name, I recognized the name of the person and I knew, here I’m really right. It was Ian Griffiths, author of the very first WPF-book, “Programming WPF”, currently in its second edition. We spoke about nearly 1 hour about developing real enterprise applications with WPF, about the WPF-Designer in Visual Studio and about using Blend for designing your app. In most cases, Ian and I had the same opinion, and we both are waiting for the datagrid as part of .NET/WPF. :-) Today there are only third-party-grids available from famous control authors like those from Infragistics. Even in .NET 3.5 and WPF 3.5 (it’s really called WPF 3.5 and not WPF 1.5), Microsoft introduced no more 2D-Controls. But WPF 3.5 contains some new 3D-Elements like UIElement3D or Viewport2DVisual3D, that receive Input Events and make interactive 3D much easier than in WPF 3.0.
Today I decided to start my own blog. So far I enjoyed life just as a blog-reader for the last couple of years. But now there are several reasons to start my own blog:
During the next days I’ll provide some stuff just heared and learned from TechEd 2007 in Barcelona.
So stay tuned…
