March 2008 - Posts

NLarge v1.1.2 (once more, with feeling, multimon and text annotation support)

Barry’s teaching a course this week and noticed that NLarge didn’t support multimon - or rather, it always zoomed in on the primary monitor. So NLarge got another update.  Good thing I don’t sleep! Changelist: Added Multimonitor support - zooms in on the monitor currently containing the mouse pointer. Added Text support - annotate zoomed-in images with [...]

NLarge v1.1.1 (once more, with feeling)

I immediately wanted to update NLarge again because its new default hotkeys (Ctrl-1 for Zoom, Ctrl-2 to Draw, Ctrl-3 for Break Timer) conflict with Outlook 2007’s hotkeys for Inbox, Calendar, and Contacts. So NLarge v1.1.1 is out. Changelist: Added ability to select your own hotkeys for zoom, draw and countdown timer. Added ability to Alt-Tab away from break timer, [...]

NLarge screen magnifier v1.1

NLarge is the screen magnification and annotation utility that I use for technical presentations. It magnifies the screen through a smooth animation, and allows you to pan and zoom around the magnified screen. You can annotate the magnified image using the mouse or a Tablet PC pen. Today I added a few features to NLarge to [...]

Silverlight 2 Greasepole Game Engine

If you’re authoring multimedia applications in Silverlight, you might be interested in how each of the core game engine services for Legend of the Greasepole is now implemented for the Silverlight 2 Beta. From C/C++ to a Provider Model-Based .NET Engine When was the last time you looked at code you wrote almost a decade ago? [...]

Silverlight 2 Beta Performance

The Silverlight 2 Beta runs rings around the Silverlight 2 Alpha. However, the lack of hardware acceleration is very noticable (and relevant to an Image-oriented application like Legend of the Greasepole) when running at higher resolutions. For a little perspective: In 1998, the first version of Legend of the Greasepole was released. Platform: Windows PC (95, 98, [...]

Legend of the Greasepole, Silverlight 2 Beta Edition

The Legend of the Greasepole is a game that began its life on July 1st, 1996, when a group of Engineering students from Queen’s University in Canada decided they’d create a way to re-live their unexplainable annual tradition from the comfort of their long-suffering computers. After last year’s XNA port, the release of the Silverlight 2 [...]

.NET Visualized: Treemap and Dependency Matrix

In case you haven’t seen this, check out MVP Patrick Smacchia’s visualizations of the .NET Framework, including an NDepend analysis of the number of Types, a Treemap view, and a dependency matrix for the entire framework. The dependency matrix is, IMO, impressively sparse. Also interesting but perhaps not surprising is that PresentationFramework represents the largest [...]

Top 3 of Mix08 (for me)

1. The Cirque du Soleil keynote demo, the most engaging articulation of WPF’s “richer, smarter, more productive line-of-business app” message since Avalon Healthcare. 2. More Microsoft Research innovation sees the light of day in the product groups and for developers at large. Deep Zoom becomes available to developers through Silverlight and demoed by the Hard Rock Cafe, [...]

Mix08 - Keynote Day 2

Just got back from the Steve Ballmer / Guy Kawasaki keynote at this year’s Mix. Is Guy ever not on form? He did a great job asking Steve the tough questions, making it fun, and getting a few candid answers, along with some “PR” answers as well, including Steve’s cautious response to “What about [...]

Download links related to Mix08 Keynote Announcements

Head over to Tim Sneath’s blog for a list of all download links related to the keynote this morning.

And then my battery died. But…

…one the most amazing and unexpected announcements of the whole keynote came for me in a WPF demo towards the end. In an update to WPF that should be available some time this summer, we’re going to get SHADER SUPPORT in WPF. Yes, that kind of shader. WPF team, I love you guys.

Mix08 Keynote - Silverlight & WPF

First let’s get to the obvious Silverlight announcements we “knew” were coming during this keynote: - Silverlight 2.0 Beta is available! - Expression Blend 2.5 (!) March Preview is available! - formal announcement of Silverlight Mobile device support! In my presentation last weekend I was asked about Silverlight adoption stats, which I predicted we’d get during the keynote. [...]

Mix08 Keynote - Internet Explorer 8

After a brief intro by Scott Guthrie, the technical component of the keynote began with Dean Hackamovitch’s first public demo of IE8. I know that this conference is fundamentally about connected systems, and the web browser is a vitally important component. But I thought this was a profoundly boring way to begin the technical announcement part of [...]

Mix08 Keynote - parting thoughts

I’ve just stepped out from the first Mix Keynote I’ve attended as a consultant rather than a Microsoftie.  There was no real shocker in there, but it was a solid keynote and I am enthused by a couple of exciting announcements Ray Ozzie began by saying he sees Mix08 as one of several milestones on a [...]

Off to Vegas!

Thanks to everyone who came out to my WPF and Silverlight presentation at the Toronto CodeCamp event yesterday. It was great to have a chance to speak with so many interested and enthusiastic people who hung around after the talk. Because the presentation was a riff on my What’s New in WPF 3.5 and Silverlight [...]

CodeCamp and Mix08 - on my blog at robburke.net

Thanks to everyone who came out to my WPF and Silverlight presentation at the Toronto CodeCamp event yesterday. It was great to have a chance to speak with so many interested and enthusiastic people who hung around after the talk. Because the presentation Read More...

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