A Sackful of WPF Tidbits

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It's been a busy month for me, primarily due to the arrival of our third child (and our first American!) The blog has suffered as a result, but I thought I'd try to make up for it by collating together some of the interesting tidbits that have floated past my inbox over the last week or so. Apologies to anyone who thought I'd fallen off the face of the planet.

  • Firstly, I've had many requests over the last few months for us to publish the source code to some of our demo applications. It's hard to embark on a large-scale application using a new technology if you don't have other examples to draw from. One particularly compelling sample is the patient monitoring application that Ben Riga and Sanjay Parthasarathy presented a year ago for the first time. This demo shows off 3D, animation, data binding, lookless controls, media integration and flow documents in a fairly real-world scenario. This application has been ported forward to the latest Windows Vista bits over time, and although it looks slightly different now, I'm pleased to say that it's presented in its full glory as a freely available source sample now at the .NET Framework 3.0 community site. We'd love to know your thoughts about this application - is it useful to you?
  • Secondly, Kiran Kumar, erstwhile member of the WPF performance team, has published a great draft whitepaper on the best practices for writing a high performance WPF application. This will wind up in the SDK, but it's too good to make you wait!
  • Next up is a very clever physics simulation engine that Chris Cavanagh dropped into my inbox late last night. What's smart about this is the way that it uses data binding to handle the scene, updating the items in a collection rather than having to do item-by-item rendering. We'd love to see the source, Chris!
  • I also want to take this opportunity to welcome a new member of my team. Laurence Moroney is our newest client platform evangelist - he's renowned as an author of a number of books including a new title on WPF. Laurence is currently working on some secret stuff, but you'll be hearing a lot more of him over the next few months.
  • Lastly, Greg Schechter and others pointed me to a nice bridge sample that uses the DWM thumbnail APIs in Windows Vista from WPF. These APIs are the ones used to generate the Flip 3D effect that you get when you hit Win+Tab, and I'm looking forward to seeing some of the ways people take advantage of these APIs from WPF.

I'm taking a few weeks' paternity leave to enjoy our new son - be seeing you around.