Advanced Visualization

Finally it sounds like somebody at Microsoft has seen the light, with Prism 2.0 offering Silverlight support. More interesting is the hint that binary compatability between WPF and Silverlight is on the cards -madness if this doesn’t happen. “We’d like to get to the point where views, styles and themes can all be re-used across WPF and Silverlight” - so would we all! “Code that is shared is linked between two projects so that it is automatically compiled into each target” Painful!

Silverlight Spy

By my reckoning we are due for Silverlight 2.0 RTM sometime shortly given that beta 2 was released in June. Having played with beta 2 I still think Microsoft has some way to go to catch Adobe. Specifically I think they need to consider the following for vNext:

• More controls - at a mininum the equivalent controls that are available in Flex 3 e.g accordian
• Full commanding support
• Better parity with WPF
  • Triggers
  • Richer data-binding
  • 3D support
  • Bitmap Effects
  • FlowDocument
  • Better rendering control (e.g. WPF SnapsToDevicePixel)
• A sensible push service in IIS, not this silly polling implementation! Think Lightstream, Liberator…..
• DataGrid and LINQ select anonymous types in your queries support

Interesting Silverlight reading:

• How to Scale your entire App and its Elements to your Browsers Size
• ViewModel Pattern
• SLUnity
• Silverlight Behaviors

Off-topic stuff:

• iPhone GUI PSD
• 10 Futuristic User Interfaces

• FlexUnit is now out in Open Source land. Hopefully Adobe can begin to provide more enterprise development tools. The one downside of FlexUnit is that there appears to be no console mode, which is unfortunate is your running on an enterprise build plant
• No surprises in this list of Silverlight RIA applications. It’s unfortunate that the RIA I was instrumental in building last year isn’t in this list
• Oslo insights
• Looks like Steve had to pull the BWM surface video :(, but at least there are a number of other Vectorform Surface video’s still online - Mercedes-Benz etc
• REST with WCF - way to much REST in my life these days
• C++0x: Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup
• With Amazon continuing to add to the cloud, one has to ask if Oslo will provide the Microsoft Cloud?
• NVISION 2008 has some impressive video’s. CPU’s continue to play to “financial market analyses”
• Are Panamaps (A Multi-Layered Map) useful in finance?
• Moth on Make Object ID
• As blogged elsewhere, Photosynth is Released.
• Kind of cool to see that Linden is rolling out Mono servers
• Google mojo?

3D rendering in the cloud. City Space is very cool. OTOY + iPhone + real time fiancial data = …

Returning from vacation is hard - the context switch back to work mode is relatively easy, what I find hard is the early morning starts (5am). There is also the 1000’s of work emails to catch up on coupled with Google Reader items.

• While I’ve been out the office it appears the Windows 7 blog has come alive. The latest posting on feature teams is worth a read if your into knowing how the Microsoft machine works.
• HSBC appears to be considering moving from Blackberry to iPhone, not surprising given that everyone appears to want an iPhone these days.
• David Chappell has written a cloud white paper which is probably worth a ready - although this article is actually more interesting as it references Red Dog and Zurich.
• With the Olympics in full swing there’s a number of posting around NBC’s Silverlight site: here, here and here.
• August 2008 MSDN Magazine has a number of interesting articles:
  • Program Silverlight with the CoreCLR
  • Create Animations with XAML and Expression Blend
  • More AsyncEnumerator Features
• Learning Parallel Programming.
• CUDA U
• NVIDIA Shows Interactive Ray Tracing on GPUs - real-time ray tracing with adequate performance for fluid motion is the future.
• Still no sign of a killer financial Microsoft Surface application
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 got released. Unfortunately the WPF DataGrid didn’t make it into the release, but at least it made it to codeplex. If your moving into WPF, you might find this book interesting.
• Visual Studio IronPython Integration Deep Dive
• Glenn Block on Prism, Unity, and MEF
• Coding the Market thinks Caplin in the answer to SDP. Maybe Mostly should consider Caplin for an OMS?
• Sounds like Microsoft needs to add a lot more servers to its cloud.
• New Gigaspaces MonteCarlo application.

Written sometime ago, but only recently published.

Lab49 has just announced this very cool iPhone / iPod Touch application for the buy-side. The application, called “Lab49 Capital”, is an example of real-time portfolio management solutions we are building for clients. As you will see in the screenshots and screencast on the Lab49 website, it provides real-time alerts, P&L and position updates for a portfolio and allows the user to drill into the portfolio across multiple dimensions such as industry, country, manager and strategy. Using the iPhone’s fantastic graphics capabilities, the application also has some very clever user interface considerations, packing in a lot of information into each of the screens.

• “Oslo” language is one of the many PDC sessions that will be worth watching.
• Geva has a curious posting on GigaSpaces and the Economics of Cloud Computing
• NetMap - a set of .NET Framework 2.0 class libraries that can be used to add network graphs to custom applications.
• F# CTP
• More details on Midori (”asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources”). Midori sounds promising assuming this article is true, and assuming (big) that Microsoft can deliver this side of 2015.
• This article appears to concur with my that Windows compatability is a real issue, and needs to be broken in the future. “astonishingly ambitious undertaking” is an under statements, especially given the history of what Microsoft has been able to release. Lets hope Midori does materialise sometime soon.
• WCF Visualizers Tool
• Bad Locking Patterns - I’m still amazed at the number of people that still use lock(this)

Video here, worth a watch

Great article, “Hands-on Computing” in Scientific American this month that covers multi-touch computer screens and how this technology, including Microsoft’s Surface and the iPhone, will change the way we interact with computers and data. There is also a supplemental article explaining how multi-touch screens work.

Adobe move ahead of Microsoft in RIA search.

Flex 4 wish list for 2009

• Reflection to the level that Java/.NET offer
• Better support for dynamic modules
• Versioning

Available Free-of-Charge without any licensing or royalties from DevExpress

It’s always worth reading MSDN articles in full as sometimes there a gem at the end of the article: If you have a choice between binding an IList<(Of )&gt or an IEnumerable to an ItemsControl object, choose the IList<(Of )&gt object. Binding IEnumerable to an ItemsControl forces WPF to create a wrapper IList<(Of )&gt object, which means your performance is impacted by the unnecessary overhead of a second object