exotribe

This is the book that Maxx and Arlen have been working on for the past millennia or so. Our goal was to write a WPF book for active developers--developers who don't necessarily have time to play around with the early release versions, but who hope to use WPF in real-world applications.

Jared Youtsey, a senior developer and colleague at Configuresoft, was recently featured in a pod cast on PodTech:

Here at Configuresoft, we are developing an infrastructure to be used to build our next generation Configuration Intelligence products. We have had lots of internal debates about which UI platform we should use for our future applications - browser or desktop. We've looked at everything from ASP.NET Ajax, Silverlight and Adobe Flex, to Java Swing, WinForms and WPF.

Say you are working on your new Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 application. You know you are going to build some slick custom styles, but you do not have the styles ready yet. You want to proceed with your application development, but want to put in placeholders for the upcoming styles.

For this example, I'm going to borrow a bit of the sample code from WPF in Action with Visual Studio 2008. The sample code builds a simple calculator user interface, then proceeds restyle the buttons with a custom template.

Setting default control styles (and templates) in Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 works a bit differently than WPF. In WPF, I can set a style in an element's resource dictionary (i.e. Application.Resources or Window.Resources) that will automatically be applied to all descendents.

Say I wanted to change the text color of all TextBlocks in my application, I could create this style in App.xaml:

<Style TargetType="TextBlock">
    <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Blue" />
</Style>

Technorati Tags: Silverlight 2.0 Silverlight Styles

I recently stumbled upon a UI design article published in the November 2004 edition of the SAP Design Guild.  The article, User Interface Patterns - Components for User Interfaces, discusses reusable components, user interface patterns, and mapping UI patterns to user tasks.

The interaction structure consists of discrete areas, known as the focus areas, each of which describes a user activity, such as entering invoice line items. A focus area is defined by its purpose for the user, by other areas to which the user can navigate, and by functions available to the user.

Technorati Tags: UI Design Business Objects

Merriam-Webster OnLine defines collaboration as:

1 : to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor

Let me tell you about how my middle-school aged children are using IM, email, Google Docs, and Windows Live SkyDrive to collaborate on their Colorado History Day projects. Colorado History Day is part of the National History Day contest:

Troy Ketsdever, a colleague at Configuresoft, will be presenting a couple of sessions next week (March 5-6, 2008) at Colorado PASS Camp.

PASS Camp is a free, information-packed day of practical SQL Server training and information. There will be a total of 32 sessions on a wide range of interesting topics plus an opening Keynote for each day. PASS Camp sessions are short, to the point, and filled with code and actual hands-on demonstrations to maximize the value to you, our peers in the SQL Server community.

Technorati Tags: SQL Server

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

A thin client (sometimes also called a lean client) is a client computer or client software in client-server architecture networks which depends primarily on the central server for processing activities, and mainly focuses on conveying input and output between the user and the remote server. In contrast, a thick or fat client does as much processing as possible and passes only data for communications and storage to the server.

Technorati Tags: Thin Client Thick Client Doloto

When I'm working at my desk, my laptop sits in a docking station with a dual monitor configuration.  However, I often work undocked, or work with a projector attached (i.e. in a meeting). When I return my laptop to the dock, I have to re-configure my monitor configuration. It is not a difficult task, involving only about half a dozen clicks, and taking only about 20 seconds. Right click on the desktop, select properties, adjust monitor 1 size, click monitor 2, click "Extend the desktop", click OK. It is not difficult, but it is annoying.

So I did what any able-bodied developer would do; I wrote a utility to make things easier for me: dispsetc.exe