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Not to endorse, but I've come across a nice set of business-oriented WPF controls from Mindscape, in New Zealand. The controls are called "WPF Elements" and contain twelve native WPF controls designed to improve your applications.
Among the controls are currency edit fields, datetime pickers and spin controls. Sounds like a nice way to move your older Win32 or WinForms applications forwards.
Since already October 2007, Microsoft has published the Windows Vista User Experience Guide ("UX Guide"), but back then, the PDF version of the document used to be marked with the text "Draft".
Now it seems that Microsoft has updated this document and removed the mark, but still the date hasn't changed. Well, this could of course be my imagination or inability to recall things correctly, but nonetheless: this PDF document appears to be a proper version, and containing all the information needed.
So, unless you already have a copy, download one today. This is about one of the best guides available about Windows application design, and could be considered a "standards specification" of sorts -- in all its 763 pages.
Microsoft has created a new three-hour set of free e-Learning content about SQL Server 2008. This content comes with the collection 6187 and it is available here.
The topics include "What's New in SQL Server 2008 for Database Development", "What's New in SQL Server 2008 for Enterprise Data Platform", "What's New in SQL Server 2008 for Business Intelligence".
Enjoy!
Microsoft has just recently announced a new service called Live Mesh. But what is this service all about? The marketing text says: "Imagine all your devices--PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones--working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about."
This sounds nice, but what does it mean for developers? With the Live Mesh SDK, you are in the future able to develop applications that store information in a mesh (or cloud), and then this information can be shared across multiple devices and even users. Since all supported devices can access the same data, Live Mesh is a concept that aims to deliver your data "anywhere, anytime". Sounds what Citrix for example is trying to do with applications. Live Mesh is for data, and the future will show what this system can deliver.
For more information, see the Silverlight-enabled tour.
I today logged in again to MSDN after a pause of about two weeks, and I noticed that the services has now a completely new user interface. The new UI looks clean to me, but I confess I initially thought my login failed, because I was expecting to be redirected to a completely different (the old) site than the normal MSDN site layout.
But, I wasn't, and on further investigation I noticed the new layout. It is similar to what MSDN is normally, with basic menus in place, etc. A little practice would reveal the new functions of the site.
I noticed from Jukka Wallasvaara's blog (Microsoft DPE, Finland) that he's added my blog to his blog roll, so let the ball roll:
Jukka's blog is here. Another one that seems to copy most (not all?) entries to Channel 10 is here.
If you are running Windows Server 2008 already, you might sometimes have the need to boot into Windows PE (WinPE) mode. Microsoft has released a new support article 947024 which gives step-by-step instructions on how to create an ISO image of Windows Server 2008's Windows PE environment.
To do so, you will need the Windows OEM Preinstallation Kit (OPK) and Windows OEM Preinstallation Kit (WAIK). Then, follow the instructions in the said knowledge base (KB) article.
Scott Guthrie's blog had earlier this week an interesting post about a new forthcoming functionality related to ASP.NET development: the ability to review LINQ datasources with live data at design time.
This is surely something many developers have wanted to see since Visual Studio 2003 and ASP.NET 1.1. Good going!
Cool! I today learned that a software company named Actipro Software has developed an Office 2007 style ribbon control that is available to be used in WPF applications. The solution includes a solution of about 15 Microsoft-licensed controls that mimic the Office 2007 interface almost completely.
If I'd be looking to develop ribbon user interfaces into my own WPF applications, it would be worthwhile to investigate this component. However, in the long run I would assume Microsoft would release the APIs to develop similar user interfaces as part of the .NET SDK kits. The future will of course tell whether this will be true or not.
Almost all new server machines today run 64-bit editions of Windows, with the older 32-bit editions becoming a minority fast. On the workstation side, 64-bit x64 systems have been used for many years already especially in the technical audience, but my feeling is that 64 bit PCs will soon start to become mainstream even on consumer computers.
For us developers, moving to the new, wider world can be terrific. No more those 2 gigabyte limitations in address space, nor mess-ups with all those five or six different Win32 calling conventions like stdcall and cdecl. On the low-level side, in 64-bit mode, the processor has new registers, and all those now start with the letter R. The general purpose registers then include RAX, RBX, RCX, RDX and R8-R15, plus others. Enough registers for many native code applications!
For .NET developers, moving to the x64 world is even simpler, because starting with .NET 2.0 introduced already in 2005. Of course, if your application is using platform invoke (p/invoke) to Win32 APIs a lot, then of course you might need to adjust the code you’ve written. But the more you keep your code managed, the better off you are.
If you need more information, I suggest starting with Matt Pietrek's excellent article titled "Everything You Need To Know To Start Programming 64-Bit Windows Systems". The article is skim on .NET development side, but the lower lever stuff is great. Of course, Intel would be the de-facto source for native developers.
Reading eWeek today I noticed that there's already discussion about Windows 7 ("Windows Seven") and its release schedule. According to eWeek, Bill Gates has mentioned that Win7 could be here already next year, but I believe this is not the case -- maybe he's talking about beta versions.
If you are working in a software development team and you are sitting periodically together to review the code that has been written, it is important to know what to do, but also how to do it properly. Generally speaking, there are several best practices that are universal to almost any more or less formal meeting, be it a code review session or not. In addition to these common rules, there are several rules that apply to code reviews.
On MSDN, there's a nice topic called "Guidelines for Conducting Design and Code Reviews", which lists the following. Lets start with two I'd categorize as common sense:
Then, specific to code review sessions:
By following these simple rules you can improve the quality of your software development process, and in the end the quality of the .NET applications you build. And that's what we're all after, right?
Yesterday night I received an e-mail I was secetly hoping I would receive: I was nominated for another year of the Microsoft MVP program.
Thanks Microsoft, it's great to be part of the team once again!
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