First forays into WPF/E
I did an event in Edinburgh on Tuesday (wet, windy and quite an unpleasant landing especially as I woke up when the chap next to me started repeating "This isn't good. This isn't good." over and over as we came in to a slightly blustery landing). Thanks to all who attended - I had a great time but found talking for a whole day took its toll. And my flight was delayed on the way home so I ended up leaving the house at 5.30am and getting home again just after 11pm. Fun, fun fun...
Anyway, as part of the event I did a bit on WPF/E, our latest technology "for delivering rich, cross-platform, interactive experiences including animation, graphics, audio, and video for the Web and beyond" (see https://www.microsoft.com/wpfe for more details). Having not played much with WPF (and therefore not had the luxury of all that goodness before) I was amazed at how easy it was to build really quite complex effects. And to mix them and animate things and add video etc. I started getting quite excited about it. On the day I threw together a couple of little demos - I didn't get time to point people to the SDK samples such as Page Turn Media and Film Strip Slideshow (you can find more on the WPF/E site link above).
ThenI started to play with adding multiple animations, opacity, videos (and animating the video player) etc. Here's one of the pages I created: https://mikeo.co.uk/Demo/WPFE/Video1/default.html. This includes a background video, overlayed with two rotating rectangles and a partially transparent video that rotates and moves around the canvas. There's some complex interaction going on there but the perfomance is still very good. I'm impressed! There are also event handlers associated with the moving video that trap mouse enter and leave events and pause and start the video accordingly. (You'll need the WPF/E CTP to view the page).