Windows Vista ISV Show-and-Tell

Interresting 3D menu at Dot net solutions!
The iBloks demo is cool. But i dont think that its any usefull.
And the last demo, oh that is so cool!

This kind of videos are very interresting imo, as it shows what people actually do, on the big companys, with all this cool stuff.

Very nice applications.  I wish I had had ( oh, how I hate the had hads) XAML and WPF for a project I worked on under contract at Canada Post.  A "simple" application to visualise address label layouts against a 2D (would of used 3D with WPF) representation of a mail sorting case(s). 

The application had to automatically try to find the optimal layout for printing labels on mail sorting cases that made them easy to see, that covered the entire width of a slot in a case reserved for a particular address, and that had entire streets together in a row, when possible, or else, "line-broke" into another section of the case if it overflowed horizontally, and of course automatically re-sort and re-flow the labels as the user resized "address sections" to fit the case in an "optimal" way, including parameters such as the reach of the postal worker doing the sorting.  And of course, allow the user to override certain labels as they know something the data doesn't, etc.... 

Printed addresses make up sections that vary in size but the application has to figure out how to make everything fit together right when printed out and applied to physical cases used to sort mail.  We used simulated annealing to find the maximum size of street names without displacing other numbers and street names, and while staying within a specific range to match the physical slots within 0.5mm acceptable error.  That was fun, and not very hard.  But cool to say .

We did the graphics in GDI+.  Managed DirectX was my first choice (in the non-beta category), but you needed another runtime, and we couldn't count on 3D acceleration anyways. 

It took about 6 months, two developers (including me), one joining near the end to help out, and a great project manager.

Time is money for sorting mail.  It's amazing that it's not 100% automated.

I really liked the Areva monitoring tool. Sure there's been some before but this looked really nice to work with...

Nothing really impressive... Yes, not bad apps. But nothing "killing".
 May be just because people tired to wait all these "goods".


WPF... WCF... WTF... Oops, sorry... Such stupid abbreviations... "Woopf"? Much more better than "double-u-pee-ef".

I confused too.
I think "F" need to be deleted.
However, this kind names are somewhat more informative than "Avalon"...even Avalon is more fancy name.

When I programmed with Apple environment, I always hassle Cocoa, Carbon, etc.

Wuhpuff?  Really?  Don't get me wrong, I say scuzzy and sequel and whizdel, but I just can't bring myself to say something like that. 

This is great stuff. 

Personally, I have been frustrated for years with form based presentation layers.  Graphic artists are too expensive, so this provides a nice segway into developing some really cool "eye candy" application, which also provides an opportunity for great features to the end user.

Some of the old guys around will argue all day long that test based UI's are the most efficient, and up to this point I would agree.  I think we are starting to see a shift where you can have really cool UI's, with tons of functionality.

YES, Windows has now implemented some of the futures you can use with linux since some time now.
I Have downloadet the Beta it looks really nice but the Hardware requirements a a little bit to high, the 3d GLX Desktop environemnt for linux does the same with much less resources:D.

when Linux becomes mainstream for application development, I'll switch my allegiance.  Until then, good luck with that

Am I the only person who thinks it's odd that these poor guys are coding from within a closet?