Archive for the ‘wpfe’ Category

More mix

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

I hear that other blogs are covering the mix pretty goood, so I’m not even going to try to compete. I don’t have much time to surf the web or open and more importantly read the feeds.

I’ll just mention a few things I find interesting. The first one would be the DLR or the possibility to run dynamic languages in the .net environment. They’re saying that Iroonpython is much faster than the defaul implementation because of the platform. I guess this should give hope to Ruby developers that one day Ruby’s gonna be fast. They even wrote a new JScript parser for it.

Sitting in the biSitting in the big Palazzo M room waiting for the last keynote also gives me time to comment on a few other things. It’s really hard to be thirsty or hungry around here. There’s free stuff everywhere – lots of it. The breakfast and lunch are full meals, not only quick bites or fingerfood, which is also great.

As I said in the previous post it is a bit cold though. The fiifth floor where I’m at now is ok, but the fourth where most of the sessions happen is less comfortable. It’s too cold for short sleeves but not cold enough that a sweater would be a perfect solution.

The conference staff is really friendly, not only the Microsoft but all the others as well. What is lacking is more charging stations which forces users to squat the hallways where you can plug yourself into the matrix directly.

Another thing I noticed was that a lot of people have tablet or tablet convertible portable computers. I find this very interesting since there aren’t really that many different models available. Also there aren’t may macs here, which was expected since that’s the competition. I sometimes feel a bit out of line with my linux powered Nokia N800.

More tomorrow. If you want to read more about the conference visit technorati and search for mix07. If you don’t like to read or want to ask something visit Spletne urice @ Kiberpipa on wednesday, May 9 2007.

WPF/E competition

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

Yesterday was a fine day that ended with a talk about the WindowsVista.si website (now offline). It’s made with WPF/E technology and is made to mimic the look & feel of the real Vista operating system. A great showcase of the technology.

There’s been much talk about WPF. The whole Windows Foundation Platform seems to be competition to the Adobe Apollo platform. They’re both made to create desktop applications. Apollo seems to be on top with the cross-platformness while Microsoft is putting its hopes on the size of the Windows developer community.

When we come ‘down’ to WPF/E (the E stands for Everywhere), the competitor everyone is talking about is Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash. They both solve a lot of common problems – animation, multimedia, drawing – stuff that you can’t do in HTML. But when you look under the hood of WindowsVista.si you’ll find there’s a bunch of JavaScripts that seem to do all the magic. And the code looks much like when you’re working with the infamous <canvas> tag.

This was also confirmed by the developer of the page – due to the limitations of the current plugin and it’s work with XAML everything on the page is dynamically created with JavaScript and is not present in the source XAML file. Since there are no components available he actually wrote all the controls himself – tabview, scrolling, panes, menus, windows,…

Two things come to mind:

  1. Direct3D vs OpenGL battle that went on about a decade ago
  2. document.layer vs document.all and the time of the DynamicDuo

Seems like a good idea would be to write a library that will seamlessly switch between WPF/E, and Flash whether they’re present or not. Especially since the tag will obviouslly never be trully cross platform (at least for a while) and that WPF/E doesn’t yet have a plugin for all platforms & browsers. Then again – what’s wrong with Flash?