Scott Gu has shed some light on some of the changes coming to WPF this year. Notably, Scott inidcates that there will be new contols for WPF, one of which is a new a "Ribbon" control. I have thought that for a while that Microsoft needed to get this control to market as the Office 2007 styling has become quite popular.

There are a number of vendors that do offer a WPF ribbon these are shown below.

• Divelements - Sandock Ribbon (Xbap demo)
• DotNetBar Ribbon
• Actipro (Xbap demo)

Also it seems more graphic intensive features such as shadowing etc are being pushed onto the graphics hardware increasing performance. V.cool!

I have just finished listening to Scott Gu's comments on Silverlight 2.0. From what he is saying 2.0 should finally offer the level of functionality to truly make Silverlight a compelling option.

Just to summarise....Silverlight 2.0 will get the following.

• Large suite of controls for developing LOB style applications
• Databinding support
• Styling and control templating
• Flowlayout support
• WCF Communications stack support

Good news!

Having attended the Alt.net UK conference a few weeks ago I am disappointed by the fact that I cannot make the US event. There's going to be some great people there and the chance to discuss topics with them would have been great.

I am making sense of my decision using the following.

• Its expensive to head over to the US just for a conference.
• I am  getting married this year and need to save some money.
• The "Mrs" gets jealous and thinks its a holiday.
• There will be other events.

With that I rest my case.

Lightning Forks

Ants nest paths

Tree root system

Most developers spend the majority of their day with their head stuck inside visual studio,  I’m no different, so as a result I like to customize my editor so that I am as comfortable as possible.  Its in this area i’m a little old fashioned. I can’t stand the default white colour settings that visual studio offers, therefore I spend quite some time tuning them so they meet my needs.  Below is an example my code windows in visual studio. I really like these settings and I feel it makes the code far more readable and items such as strings, numbers, operators, keywords and regions are all specifically coded.

Many of my colleagues have commented that my settings make my code window look like a Christmas tree. So if your feeling like you want to be a little festive then you can grab them here.

As some of you may know..... and some may not, I have been working with Conchango on a project for the last 9 months. The conchango guys are great to work with, so when they asked if I wanted to attend the Alt.Net conference this weekend (as they were hosting it), I was chuffed as originally I had thought I had missed the registrations.

The conference was broken up over two days. Friday was a meet and greet session in the evening, everyone gets the opportunity to propose a session that they would like covered on the Saturday. I was really impressed with the topics that were up for discussion, my two offerings were "Declarative Programming & Testability" and "Why use ORM".

After filling the whiteboard with post it notes, I was amazed to see just how many where were related to testing and general quality of development. Having defined a rough agenda for the Saturday, everyone headed off to the Bankside bar where we could get to know each other. I couldn't stay too long as getting home takes an hour and half and had been at work all day I was a little shattered.

Over the next week I will be updating you about the sessions I attended and some of the key conclusions I came to. Generally though, I thought the conference was a great success. I got to meet some fantastic people and validate my ideas against others... oh and play a little table football. Many thanks must go to Ian Cooper, Alan Dean and Ben Hall for great organisation.

Last night I awoke around 3am in a state of panic. What you ask could be making me worry? The answer is simple.....

Visual Studio implementing the Ribbon Bar 

Lucky for me it was just a dream..........it was wasn't it?

Last weekend I was at a wedding fair with my fiancée looking at the last remaining big things we need to get sorted for our wedding in August. While there, I ran into my brother in-law (to be) who is also getting married. As he works at my old company we naturally ended up talking shop. During this time  the girls were browsed for fairy dust or something. (I think it’s fair to say we aren't really there by choice. :-))

So during our discussion he told me about his boss asking him to get some Microsoft certs and he had a choice between BizTalk and SharePoint. At the time I said get the SharePoint certs as they are far more likely to get you a job in the future as SharePoint is generally more popular in the enterprise. After that I moved on and forgot about things.... until today.

As I was going for a walk during my lunch time I started to think about Microsoft’s current strategy for BizTalk and how there seems to be this awkward situation now that windows workflow has arrived. Having worked with both WF and BizTalk it is clear where the difference are between the products. I have listed these below.

1.) BizTalk is the enterprise solution and can scale (albeit costly), workflow is not currently seen this way.

2.) BizTalk comes with a set of adaptors/accelerators for EAI, workflow has WCF, but custom formats such as EDI are not backed in.

3.) BizTalk provides sophisticated BAM. Some work has been carried out to allow Workflows to integrate with BizTalk’s BAM but this can be considered just an integration point with BizTalk.

4.) BizTalk comes with productivity tool like the mapper. XSLT is still a rare skill and the mapper is not available for WF.

5.) BizTalk has a sophisticated rules engine. Workflow does not.

6.) BizTalk comes with Health and Activity monitoring.

Although there are many additional enterprise features that BizTalk has offer over WF, there is one issue and that needs to be addressed. That is, that Microsoft now has two retail workflow/orchestration engines. 

Having two workflow engine technologies is just not right, and Microsoft has recognised that. As a result  WF is due to be integrated into future versions of the BizTalk product.  However doing so raises a number of questions around the value of BizTalk as a product on its own right.  If WF provides the core orchestrations (which is really the selling point of BizTalk) then surely the other features of BizTalk are just extension to WF? 

Sample design surface for WF below< ...

So last year I updated my MCSD to the .net 2.0 certifications that included features such as generics etc. I left that update a little late in the day as I had not really had a need to update them and they felt like small extensions to the 1.1 certs I had already achieved.

Over the last year and half I have been workign with .NET 3.0 technolgies, 3.0 brings a raft of new technolgies to the developer. The 3 core technolgoy center pieces being WPF, WF and WCF.

As a result I have been eagerly awaiting the .net 3.0 exams in order to keep my certification up to date. It seems however microsoft have decided to skip by 3.0 certs and go straight to 3.5. Either way I'm happy and I will be boooking myself in in the not too distant future.

Exam 70-502 Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - Windows Presentation Foundation. Expected to be released in February 2008. http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/70-502.mspx

Exam 70-503 Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - Windows Communication Foundation. Expected to be released in February 2008. http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/70-503.mspx

Exam 70-504 Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - Windows Workflow Foundation. Expected to be released in March 2008.  http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/70-504.mspx

Here’s a useful tip for you budding WPF aficionados out there.  If there is any chance that the text in a textblock may become truncated (the databound text may not fit or the window may be resized), assuming you don’t want the text to wrap (where you would use the TextWrapping attribute), add the TextTrimming attribute.  Your options are None (no ellipse – default), WordEllipse (an ellipse is inserted after the last word that fits) or CharacterEllipse (an ellipse is inserted after the last character that fits).

Example from MSDN

<TextBlock 
  Name="myTextBlock" 
  Margin="20" Background="LightGoldenrodYellow" 
  TextTrimming="CharacterEllipse" TextWrapping="NoWrap"
  FontSize="14"
>
  One<LineBreak/>
  two two<LineBreak/>
  Three Three Three<LineBreak/>
  four four four four<LineBreak/>
  Five Five Five Five Five<LineBreak/>
  six six six six six six<LineBreak/>
  Seven Seven Seven Seven Seven Seven Seven
TextBlock>

Results in

Hope it helps.

I was recently having issues with a XAML structure I was working on. The stucture of my XAML was as follows.

LISTBOX (Bound to collection of custom objects)

{Item Template}

ListView (Bound to Collection of Child Objects that hangs of the Parent binding)

Now when I ran the app I got the binding firing for each parent and associated child collection but when the xaml renders only the first listboxitem has a listview bound below it. Is this a bug in the way ListViews work when nested within a Listbox's data template?

The answer it turns out is a big YES. Apparently, this is a know issue in WPF. In order to resolve this issue you need to make sure that all your datatemplates are moved to resources. Only then will the databinging and rendering work.

My XAML is show below for reference.

Window x:Class="WpfApplication1.Window1" xmlns=http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation xmlns:x=http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300" >
<StackPanel VerticalAlignment="Stretch" >
<Button Click="Button_Click">Run Test</Button>
<ListBox Name="ParentListBox&q ...

Started created my new site with DNN. I have used this product for years now and it keeps getting better. I have worked on many large scale enterprise implementation using the platform and I am hoping to blog about some of the issues you have when trying to scale the platform. As for my site its just going to be a place for me to blog so hopefully I wont need to concern myself with these matters!  Below are some the sites I have developed previously.

www.hiscox.de

business.hiscox.co.uk

www.insurex.co.uk

 www.glynoldboys.com

www.hiscox.fr

www.ontheblog.net