WINFX Feb CTP just announced

Just reading the latest post from Tim Sneath Here

Just announced the latest Feb CTP for WINFX. Looks like there may be more changes in this one compared to the Jan.

Looks like another all night download to get the SDK down again.

Guess we wait until Jan CTP in uninstalled and Feb CTP is installed onto new laptop now before we begin our journey.

The Laptop is upgraded, we begin soon

I have had to upgrade my laptop from 512MB to 1.5GB as the 512MB was suffering having Visual Studio 2005 open with all its WINFX plugins.

My 1Gig stick arrived yesterday and has been installed successfully. I have yet to run up Visual Studio and see how it runs, but I am hoping that performance will be better.

I have also downloaded the Hands-On-Labs from the PDC05, cant remember link now though, but email me if anyone wants it and I will find it.

Just gonna start working through them soon. I also plan to do a presentation to my work colleagues and managers soon on WINFX and what it all means.

Later...

WPF, 3 little things

I have been reading up a bit now on Windows Presentation Foundation (Formerly Avalon). It is very difficult to know where to start, there are numerous articles sprinkled around the web, but it is not easy finding some kind of coherant learning experience.

From what I have found so far, it seems that there are 3 main selling points for WPF

1. It frees up the CPU and effectively passes graphical responsibility to the Graphics card. This advantage of course only pays off if you have a good graphics card. I have yet to find out if there are any minimum specification of card or if there is a switch at which point the graphics card is ignored and the CPU has to handle the graphics.

2. It will provide the richness of Windows Forms development within a browser windows, bringing with it all of the benefits associated with applications presented withing a browser window. However, this will mean that the host PC will require a Windows OS and browser to support it. So to reap the benefits of WPF all of your clients will require the WINFX runtime.

3. The GUI design of the application can be split out from the business code. I am unsure how much of an advantage this really is. In WPF, you can define your GUI in XAML (A specification over XML) and this is compiled somehow into the application. I remember learning about .NET Remoting and how you could contain all of the configuration information in an XML config file if you hosted the service in IIS. I am unsure if the benefits that this approach gave .NET remoting are the same as what XAML gives the WPF. Of course WPF GUI definition does not require XAML, it can be programatically defined via any .NET language (C#, VB.NET etc).


Whilst writing this, it was just reported on the news that the UK womens Curling team have been knocked out of the competition. Ho hum, 1 silver it is then.

WinFX begins

Have decided that I need to keep up with what Microsoft is doing in the arena that I work in, therefore have been researching a bit into WINFX recently.

I have a company laptop (IBM Thinkpad T40 512MB) and my own personal computer (1.4GHz 512MB). I cannot really install too much software on the company laptop incase it has to go back to HQ for work.

Therefore I have bought myself a new laptop purely for WINFX and other research. I did not want to spend too much on this, so set myself a budget of £500. What I ended up with is an ACER Aspire 3613 from Ebuyer

I have now installed the the Jan CTP for WINFX including all of the additional components that plug into Visual Studio 2005.

You know youve made it when

you can type some key (ish) words from your website and they appear near the top of the search engines.

Google

MSN

Altavista

My Talk-PC site got posted to the search engines about 2 weeks ago. It is a bit disheartening at first when you keep going to Google and get nothing returned.

Now my search is complete

Race for Life - Sponsorship request

My wife (Ann-Maria) is running the Race for Life again this year in aid of Cancer Research.

I would love anyone ready this to sponsor her, her own Race for Life web-page is here
Please Sponsor Her

Thanks for listening

Evening work - Talk-PC

I have been working on a bit of an evening project recently. Setting up a website to support Computer Problems in the Warminster, Westbury and Frome areas of Wiltshire. The site is written using Visual Studio 2005 professional (See earlier post on where I got this from, thanks Microsoft).

Site is currently in state of change, but can be found here if anyone is interested in how my Web-prowess is getting on.

I am currently investigating how to get the site crawled by Googlebot and other search engines. My intention is for a local user to be able to type something like "Computer Solutions Frome" or "Computer Repairs Warminster" and the site to appear high in search engine listings.

The DotNetKicks Blog

The DotNetKicks Blog
A new community Kick site as detailed in this blog

History (ish)

Highly amusing, possibly not completely factually correct article here from Billy Hollis on the history of 'C' and 'BASIC' Languages.
here