July 2006 Entries

I've just begun implementing some web services with WCF and so I'm in the midst of learning the ins and outs of the API. First off, it's phenominal as I'm sure you've heard if you already know if you've read about it before. What you might not know, if you haven't played around with it yourself, is that the documentation is still pretty shoddy at this point. It definitely seemed to make some progress in the June CTP, but it still seems that if you want to do anything past the basics you really need to dig around and figure it out for yourself. What's funny/frustrating is that a lot of the documentation outline is done, so you'll see that there's a topic available to answer your questions, but then you click on it and you see a page filled with "Insert content here". For example: Sending Faults.. :\ Luckily there's a lot of people out there writing articles, blogging and of course there's always the MSDN forum for WCF too.

Maybe I'm just spoiled by the plethora of WPF documentation that is available. Gotta give that team some serious kudos because they've consistently delivered some of the most up to date and complete documentation I've ever seen for a pre-release product.

posted Wednesday, July 26, 2006 11:10 PM | Comments | Filed Under [ WinFx/Vista ]

Guess we can look forward to the first service pack for VS 2005 in Sept. For details, check out this page over on MSDN.

posted Wednesday, July 26, 2006 1:38 PM | Comments | Filed Under [ .NET Team System ]

Simply put, XBAP is the sandboxed, browser based application model for WPF. What's that mean? Well head on over to Channel9 and watch this video to get all the nitty gritty details on the feature.

posted Tuesday, July 18, 2006 9:33 PM | Comments | Filed Under [ WinFx/Vista ]

Someone posted a question in the WPF MSDN forums today where they wondered if it was "easy" to change the default stacking behavior of the TabControl to use the scrolling paradigm used in an application such IE7 or Visual Studio instead.

It turns out this is actually very "easy" in that you don't have to write a single line of C#. Instead you simply need to edit the ControlTemplate for the TabControl. I replied to the post with some sample XAML that provides the basic approach to acheiving this. Be forewarned that the visuals aren't exactly pretty by designer standards, but I think the sample still gets the point across. ;P

I loooove examples like this because they really show just how powerful the templating model inside of WPF is, which is made possible by the powerful separation of the logical and visual trees.

posted Friday, July 14, 2006 11:47 PM | Comments | Filed Under [ WinFx/Vista ]

Run, don't walk, over to Channel9 and check out this awesome demonstration of all the capabilities of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals. Then click here to download the latest CTP which was released last week.

While database projects weren't amazing in VS2003, I was extremely frustrated that they absolutely crippled the feature in VS2005. You can't generate .dat files anymore, it doesn't generate command files anymore and it generates schema files in a completely diff. fashion than 2003. Not cool at all. Luckily this new Team Edition for DBs really makes up for it 100x over... just wish it was released at the same time as the rest of VSTS.

posted Wednesday, July 12, 2006 6:29 PM | Comments | Filed Under [ Team System ]

I noticed via a post on Rob Relyea's blog that an interview, with Rob himself, was posted over on Channel9 last night. The interview is all about XAML and how it works its magic.

Why XAML? Is it compiled? If so, how does it get compiled? WTH is BAML? How does the code-behind get wired together?

All these questions and more are answered, so go check it out!

posted Thursday, July 06, 2006 1:47 PM | Comments | Filed Under [ .NET WinFx/Vista ]