Comments

Excellent video, really interesting to hear from Dean again. Not sure if I answered my own question or if Charles did, but good answer all the same. Now off to download PP7 and give it a try!

Very funny. Episode 1 can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N24TWrtlJEU

Ironically the demos actually work better when it cuts back to the main camera and you can see it on the screen behind you guys. Whilst screencaps are better if you're showing code samples which need to be readable, I think it's overkill for the "here's a resizing purple box" type of thing.

 

Got to be said though, this stuff looks very useful. I can see it being very helpful at improving performance in a lot of scenarios.

I think the point is you can't do the "video in a button" demo purely with the VS2008 visual designer, you have to use either code or, more likely, XAML. Quite how that is relevant to creating LOB apps is beyond me though. And ultimately, while it might require a smidgen of XAML knowledge (or Blend)  to put video on a button in WPF, try doing the same thign in WinForms, even with a huge amount of code.

WPF has a steep learning curve, for sure, but I think it's wrong to dismiss it as being a 'web style' tool just because XAML looks vaguely HTML like. And yes it's a little encumbered by the fact the VS designer is a bit limited (though pretty close to parity with the WinForms designer I'd say). However once you've taken the time to learn it, WPF walks all over WinForms in terms of being able to create UI for an application and going back to writing for WinForms feels horribly cumbersome.

Very cool. My last project was an Excel app that presented data using WPF using a custom UI specified in loose XAML files. Was very pleased with the result, but have to admit that it was flakier than I'd have liked if given bad markup (I lost count of how many times I had to go delete x:Class!) The new XAML APIs look ideal for that sort of scenario, so I'll definitely be checking them out.

Facinating. The UMS stuff is very interesting and you can never have enough of Dave Probert talking about the Windows kernel design.

Well, for one thing, if the taskbar buttons were any smaller it'd be really awkward to use with a touch sensitive screen. As it is they're about finger sized, making selecting them easy. The split buttons would probably also have been awkward in the scenario as they are too small to use usefully.

Oooh, this is just so cool. Can't wait to have a play with it.

The raising an executable to IR sounds very interesting. Presumably this could allow you to migrate executables to another CPU architecture (much like Rosetta in MacOS) if that ever became an issue for Windows.