My love-hate relationship with SilverLight (WPF/e)

To quote wikipedia:

A love-hate relationship is a personal relationship between humans or organizations, or figuratively between a human and an inanimate object, like a computer, a field of study, a body of ideas, or a profession, involving simultaneous or alternating emotions of love and enmity. This relationship can, but does not have to be of a romantic nature.

I have a such a relationship with the evolving technology currently called SilverLight. Originally codenamed “WPF/e”, Microsoft’s new “Flash-killer” has been both a bane and a boon at times. I’m just going to address some of my own personal gripes with it…and some of the cool things I’ve been able to use it for. While I know that SilverLight isn’t actually aimed at me because I don’t seek to use it for (buzz word alert) RIAs and such, I’ve found other uses for it that I believe are valid. For instance, if you’ve ever used JavaScript graphics (which is extremely slow and bloats your code because you place a whole bunch of div tags in you page) then SilverLight is a great alternative. Not only is it a million times faster, it’s pretty simple to use/integrate with. The major reason I see SilverLight taking off/or at least taking some of the steam out of Flash’s engine is the fact that it’s so easy to integrate with…and of course with the 1.1alpha…CLR support. Using myself as an example…I don’t know ActionScript…and at no time have I even bothered to take the time to try to extend myself and learn more than just the basic stuff. But I do know JavaScript…and I’m much more willing to use SilverLight because of it.

Orcas…

I find myself waiting…7 HOURS!…for the Orcas Beta 1 to finish downloading. So…in the meantime…I’m going to try out the Express Editions. I tried toying with Orcas last CTP…but I wasn’t all that impressed (especially after downloading and extracting 7  separate images)…hopefully…there’s some new stuff. And at least I get to play with the 3.5 Framework…

Edit: OMG…the C# Express version is 864 MB big. Why is everything so huge? There’s no way this thing is going to fit on a single DVD when it’s done…not if it’s still 5.4 GB big — for the Professional Edition. I wonder why it’s so huge?

How to programmatically change the SelectedItem in a WPF TreeView

EDIT: I’ve moved this page to my website.

New Job…

I guess the only thing better than getting paid to do something you love is to be getting paid more to do something you love. Hence, the reason I find myself moving 800 miles away from all my friends and family. But when opportunity knocks, one must listen. I guess that I’m actually kind of excited. My new city is about a million times bigger, there are more things to do; and suprisingly the cost of living appears to be slightly lower. Then there’s the fact that I’m switching timezones…so like…all my late night shows come on earlier…shyeah! Not to mention, I’ll be working on the kind of product that I’ve had some interest in for quite some time. So instead of saving the world one line of code at a time…here…in beautiful Beaufort…I get to do it somewhere else. Hopefully, everything works out. It’d better…cuz I said so…

WPF Expander Control – Cool Things Part 2 (Animation and Auto-collapsing)

Hmm…looking back at how I did my first “tutorial” on basic animation with the expander control, I realize that I did a very poor job of displaying how to animate — as well as making a scalable/reusable solution. Well, today, I’m going to fix that. Today, we’re going to make a custom expander control the right way. We’re going to use Expression Blend when we can, and we’re going to inherit our control from the Expander control. Not only that, we’re going to give ourselves the option of having animation…or not having animation — and we’re going to give ourselves some measure of control over how our animation takes place. So let’s get started.

Expression Blend Beta 2…YAY!!!

Apparently Microsoft released a new version of Expression Blend two days ago!!! For some odd reason…it didn’t show up in my Visual Studio Startup page. But that’s ok…cuz I’ve got peoples…and they tell me when cool stuff comes out. So yeah…it’s about 9:20 here…meaning I’ve got about a cool 45 minutes to play with the new beta.

Naomi

Naomi is the name of my (relatively) new project which involves emulating Sega’s last console…the Dreamcast. As of this writing, I think I’ve put in about 2 months of development…all by myself I might add. What originally started off as a managed C# project, has morphed into an ambitious C++ application that uses a cross bewteen a Dynamic Recompiler…and Just-In-Time Compiler for Hitachi’s SuperH 4. Even though I’ve yet to make any significant progress…such as emulating a demo…or…anything for that matter — I’m extremely proud of the work that I’ve done so far…and by the many new things I’ve learned.

How to make a basic AutoComplete Textbox using WPF

EDIT: I’ve moved this page to my website.

WPF Expander Control – Cool Things Part 1 (animation)

Hmm…this is by no means a tutorial. There – that’s my disclaimer. So now that I’ve absolved myself from all WPF-sin, we can get started. WPF…that’s Windows Presentation Foundation for the layman…has been around for over a year now in multitude of incarnations (Avalon, WinFX, etc.) , and is the backbone Microsoft’s new OS “Vista”. If you didn’t already know, WPF uses a customized XML language called XAML for creating/rendering all of its controls. XAML (rhymes with camel) stands for Extensible Application Markup Language…and quite honestly…is the coolest thing since sliced bread.

My first post…

Here’s my first post. Yay! Ok…now that that’s out of the way…we can get started on the real stuff. Hmm…it’s been about 4 months since I closed my website…and I figured that it was about time for me to get back to writing about the things I’ve learned…and…of course…those things that frustrate the hell out of me. But anyways, at least my first post is done…so now…I can rant.