06.16.07
Posted in Presentations at 6:10 pm by Cal
Last Tuesday I made a presentation for the Inland Empire .NET User’s Group in Riverside California.? This presentation was essentially an introduction to WPF which included building a simplified version of my Senegal XBAP application.? I also gave a brief demo of my Drink Mate Wedding Proof application.?
? The meeting was attended by about 20 people.? Our room was almost full so I guess that attendance must have been better than average.? Also, this group had a lot of questions — something which I enjoy a lot.? The group meets in the facilities of the Riverside Medical Clinic (shown in the photo above).?
To avoid the possibility of arriving late, my flight from the Bay Area arrived? before 1:30 in the afternoon.? After getting my? luggage and my rental car, I arrived in Riverside at around 3:00 (in plenty of time for my 6:30 meeting).? ? ? ? To use this extra time efficiently I went to the public library and practiced my presentation.?
? I would like to give special thanks to James Johnson for arranging this meeting and hosting it.? Everything ran very smoothly and I’m sure that he was principally responsible for that.?
? The next morning my wake up call was at 3:30 AM.? This allowed me to drive to the rental car company lot at LAX by 4:45 and to make my flight to Seattle by 6:15 AM.? Ouch, that two hours of sleep isn’t really enough.? ? Much as I dislike wasting my time sleeping, I undoubtedly need a lot more than two hours.
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06.05.07
Posted in Classes, Presentations at 10:06 am by Cal
On my recent visit to Santiago, Chile I arranged with Microsoft to do a WPF presentation for several of Microsoft’s ISV partners and clients. The photograph above shows the marquis in front of the Microsoft building indicating the many tech companies present at the same location.
While my Spanish is very passable for casual conversations and daily interactions like purchasing food or gasoline, it is hopelessly inadequate for making a technical presentation. Accordingly, my presentation was conducted fully in English. To my pleasant surprise the audience exhibited a very solid capability in both understanding and speaking English. Throughout the evening I received many questions in English that were well phrased and easy for me to understand. And from follow up questions I was able to discern that my responses were also well understood.
The most interesting little incident involved a question regarding interop between Windows Forms applications and WPF. My response was that this would be discussed — at least tangentially — in one of my upcoming Webcasts. When asked about when this Webcast was scheduled to appear I responded some time in late June. Then the fellow sitting to my left pulled out his cell phone and played with it for a couple moments and finally said: On the 21st, the 25th and the 29th. Wow, was I impressed. (He also admitted having watched my Data Binding Webcast.)
Afterwards we retreated to a nearby bar for some drinks and food. I was persuaded to try some Chilean beer (sorry to have forgotten the brand) which I enjoyed very much. For me, all in all, a very enjoyable evening.
I hope to be able to return to Chile during the Christmas season to conduct some WPF training classes for Qunitec and / or New Horizons. Anyone who is interested in attending is requested to Email me and I will refer you to the person who can help you to enroll.
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05.08.07
Posted in Presentations at 1:28 pm by Cal
Here is the? schedule of my upcoming MSDN Webcasts:
Friday May 11 1:00 PM WPF Animations
Monday May 14 1:00 PM WPF Data Binding
Wednesday May 16 12:00 PM WPF User Interface Updates
Friday May 18 1:00 PM Creating WPF Greeting Cards
Monday May 21, 1:00 PM Building Calendars Using WPF
You can watch these webcasts live at the times specified or you can download them later to watch them at your convenience.
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04.29.07
Posted in Presentations at 3:32 pm by Cal
On Wednesday, May 9 I will be making a presentation for the Central California .NET Users Group in Fresno.?
Here’s an outline for this presentation:
Windows Presentation Foundation is a new programming paradigm introduced in Version 3.0 of the .NET Framework as an alternative to traditional Windows Forms programming. WPF effectively permits the separation of user interface design (to be principally implemented by designers) from the underlying functionality (to be implemented by developers) using a new XML variant, XAML. WPF also permits almost any control to host any other control, thereby allowing dramatic user interface designs such as buttons hosting videos or 3D drawings. WPF also permits every control to be built in a scalable fashion so that an entire form — including buttons, graphics, labels, textboxes and the text which they contain — can be expanded or shrunken simply by dragging the sizing handle.
This presentation will attempt to clarify the following:
What is WPF?
How does WPF compare to Windows Forms Development?
Does WPF Require Windows Vista?
What are the Other Requirements of WPF?
What is XAML and how is it used by WPF?
What is WPF/E?
What is XBAP?
What are the Applications in the Expressions Suite?
For information about the location and other details, see the Central California .NET Users web site.
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Posted in Presentations at 2:34 pm by Cal
I will be giving a presentation on Dependency Properties, Routed Events and WPF built-in Commands for East Bay.NET on May 10th.? Here’s a description of what I will be talking about.?
Windows Presentation Foundation is a new programming paradigm introduced in Version 3.0 of the .NET Framework as an alternative to traditional Windows Forms programming. WPF effectively permits the separation of user interface design (to be principally implemented by designers) from the underlying functionality (to be implemented by developers). WPF also permits great flexibility in designing dynamic user interfaces, for example, allowing almost complete scalability and flow control. As an illustration of this point, see the? Seattle Post-Intelligencer? NewsReader. Note how this application seamlessly scales, flows and repaginates — very impressive.
To implement these capabilities in WPF, Microsoft had to modify and supplement certain existing portions of the .NET Framework. In particular, the old method of independently setting the properties of each component object in a user interface had to be supplemented with a method of setting a property at one level and having that value penetrate down the element tree to propagate that value to various sub elements. When configured to achieve this goal, setting a new font size at the Window level can automatically and instantaneously change the font size of all controls hosted by the Window. This technology forms the basis of styling and animation in WPF.
This presentation will include a primer on why Windows Presentation Foundation is such an important new development along with an in-depth review of Dependency Properties and Routed Events — two of the most significant (and complex) technical areas of WPF. It will also include coverage of WPF built-in Commands which make use of Routed Events to provide amazing functionality with only a couple words of code.
If you are interested in attending you can register here.
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04.04.07
Posted in Presentations at 11:48 am by Cal
Tonight I will be presenting at the
SD Forum in Palo Alto with
Peter Kellner . We will be discussing WPF for a group of professional Windows application developers. My responsibility will be to give an overview of the various tools which are available for creating WPF applications. These tools include XAMLPad (surprisingly useful for many simple WPF tasks), Expression Blend (critical for creating animations) and Visual Studio (critical for adding functionality).
For this presentation, I have a completely different set of demo applications to show from my other recent WPF presentations. Considering that there is such a wealth of cool WPF demos to choose from, it is hardly a burden to select an alternate set to illustrate almost any point.
Anyone interested in a copy of my Powerpoints is welcome to Email me.
Post-Meeting addendum:
I had a very enjoyable meeting tonight fielding many excellent questions on WPF. My portion of the presentation consisted primarily of a review of the tools for creating WPF applications (XAMLPad, Expression Blend and Visual Studio). Peter gave a brief introduction of WPF and XAML and then later showed a WPF/E application which he had written for the Silicon Valley Code Camp.
Many thanks to David Korn and Jean-Luc Brouillet for organizing such an excellent meeting.
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