Family.Show from Vertigo

Every once in a while you run across really neat application that uses the latest technologies...while providing a real compelling user experience and in this case it's to map your family tree.  The experience is so intuitive - the one feature I'd like to be able to do - is grab my family contacts from Outlook and drop them directly into app - that would probably make building up these relationships even easier.

The other good news is that it's a ClickOnce install and even runs in Firefox and the source code is available.

I see Dead People, with Windows Presentation Foundation

For a hobby that revolves around dead people, genealogy is remarkably  popular: it's the fastest growing scene in North America. And a perfect study for Vertigo's next Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) reference application for Microsoft.

Our designers employed every trick in the WPF book– styles, resources, templates, data binding, animation, transforms– to present an innovative visualization of the classic family tree, freeing our developers to concentrate on behind-the-scenes features like XPS, P/Invoke wrapper for Windows Vista common dialogs, and ClickOnce for WPF.

Source: Vertigo: Family.Show