Making A Difference

Another awesome CINNUG Tuesday as Joe Wirtley provided an enthusiasts overview of WPF and Parag Joshi showed us how to debug for the XBox with XNA.  Although Joe sees himself as an enthusiast, he did a great job pointing out many of the deep and technical issues involved.  WPF is one of the three pillars of .NET, the other two including WF and WCF.

I had the opportunity to meet Kelly Foster, someone who has attended somewhat regularly over the last few years.  LUCRUM’s Rich Rayburn also showed up.  Dan Hounshell and I talked about Telligent’s Community Server, and with Enterprise 2.0 facilitating true collaboration the product fits right in a sweet spot.  I’m hoping to present Community Server to LUCRUM as a potential product that we can introduce to our clients.

I don’t know if you’ve faced this or not, but some of our clients have asked for solutions other than SharePoint because of either cost or IT not able to implement for 6 to 9 months.  Not that we’re getting away from SharePoint.  We do see the need for market alternatives, though.

It’s always good to see Ed Summerfield at community events as he provides a markedly differing perspective from time to time.  Who else?  Leon Gersing, Ronn Sokol, Brad Butts, Michael Ren, Mike Wood, Mike Levy, Maggie Longshore, and a bucketload of others.  Notably absent was Matt Brewer who had some family event to attend.  Sheesh, where are your priorities, Matt ?!  My apologies if I did not mention you.  Please note in the comments

Let’s see if I can get some of this WPF stuff right.  WPF provides a fairly clean separation between presentation and code as you now separate your screen from the description of the screen.  Using XAML, a developer describes the screen, and the magic of DirectX and vector graphics turns the XML into something usable.  WPF walks up and down the XAML hierarchy looking for properties and routed events if a particular description does not include them.  So if I have it right, at the description of the window you can include, say, particular color properties, and if a control within the window description does not include that color then WPF will go looking for it elsewhere in the XAML tree.  I don’t think this is as much inheritance as it is a resource lookup, but I also have not developed with WPF and I may be blowing smoke.

A point of ambiguity and potential frustration is that in WPF the logical tree can have multiple roots.  I think this Josh Smith WPF article describes some of these issues.  Another point of debugging interest is that typos in the XAML will not throw an error.  You’ll simply get a ‘not found’ output message.

Like the Gang of Four Command Pattern, commands in WPF work the same way.  An action is an instance of an object.  An executed command raises a routed event where the command is bound to the stuff being done.

You really need Visual Studio 2008 to be productive with WPF, and make sure to check the box to open the designer in XAML rather than the visual designer if you’d rather work in the code.

From left to right, Joe recommends the following WPF reference books:

Swag for the evening included a coffee mug, MS Office 2007, and a couple of books:

Mike Wood finished up with some announcements about the group.  Now through November will be a membership drive.  A nice prize will be given away at the November meeting.  You get an entry with each meeting you attend.  If you bring someone who has not attended a meeting before you’ll get an extra entry.  Last year’s prize was an XBox.

Elections will be held at the October meeting.  To vote and/or to be nominated for an officer position you need to attend 3 of the last 6 meetings.  All of this is described in detail in the bylaws on the CINNUG page.

The bottom line is that the group covered a lot of great material!  If you weren’t there, make an effort to get there next time.

- Andy