Amazing 3D that stands out literally (via Gizmondo). Hope to see such effects used in more applications. 

IM.NET was designed and written by me to familiarize myself with C# and .NET framework in early 2003. I was familiar with the Jabber/XMPP protocol at that time and was looking to take C# and .NET for a test drive.

Now with Linq/XLinq integration in C# 3.0 due next year, it looks like the best time to take it out of the closet and take the new technologies for a test drive and find out if the hype behind functional programming is really justified. This time I have also decided to open source the application under the Mozilla/LGPL license and host it at Codeplex.

I am currently cleaning up some of the old code and plan on adding some technical documentation and hope to release the source by mid-September.

If you are looking to convince your Boss to let you play with WPF, then these three videos will come in handy.

1.       Healthcare demo

This App is a great demo on a real and practical use of Avalon and covers most of it’s features. It expands the definition of User Experience for Line of Business applications.

2.       The Northface Demo

This video pushes the limits of Avalon to explore new UI concepts with 3D and media.

3.       Evolution of Avalon

For folks who are discovering  AJAX and sing wonders of it, this video delivers a good reality check. I like this video especially since I experienced the wonders and pains of DHTML in two major applications in the late 1990s and early 2000.

One of my feedbacks to Microsoft was that they should have shipped a stripped down version of Avalon in 2003 on Windows XP and it’s was nice to see Michael agreeing.

If your Boss is still not convinced and does not have a good reason, then maybe it’s time to look around ;-)

I have a lot of respect for Miguel and his work with Mono but statements like “Avalon is the J2EE of GUI Apps” is just nonsense.

Having worked for the last one year to architect and build an Avalon (WPF) application, I can say that the Avalon team has made most of the right choices to build a system that you pay for what you need only. It follows the goal - Keep simple things simple and complex things require more work.  

On the other hand J2EE goal was that all things (simple or complex) should require the same amount of work and should be wrapped up in object oriented goodness. That’s why writing a simple J2EE app that dumps information into a web page is so difficult compared to Rails.

But what about the big Avalon learning curve?

It depends on what you are trying to do … If you are planning to drag and drop controls and use them like black box controls  (just like Windows Forms or old Visual Basic) then the curve does not exist. Using Sparkle and Visual Studio Orcas, you can happily create great UIs just like the old days by buying custom controls that are fancier than Windows Form controls.

If you are planning to skin the controls (Avalon’s template and styling), then you need to understand core concepts and tools like Sparkle help.  

If you want to do some fancy 3D, then you need to understand 3D Geometry and tools like Zam 3D help.

I could go on and on, but the point here is that Avalon has all this power but you don’t pay for it unless you want to use it (unlike J2EE).

Karsten makes some good honest comments on WPF learning curve.  WPF integrates multiple visual technologies into one unified API and that brings with it a big learning curve.

The good news is that once you are past the learning curve, you will totally change the UX (User Experience) in your software (hopefully for the better).

So how do you get there?

Here are some steps that may be helpful…

1. Take a step back and forget what you know about Win32, GDI, Windows Forms, etc.

This is a very important step. If you bring in the baggage of how things were done in the past, it makes the curve steeper.

2. Understand the fundamentals

The PDC 05 videos are a great place to understand fundamentals like

·       Every XAML element is a .NET CLR object

·       A WPF XAML file is an object tree that describes rendering information.

·       How WPF works at the bits and bytes level – Logical and Visual trees

·       And so on …

3. Translate those fundamentals into each area of WPF for an in-depth understanding.

Now that you understand the fundamentals, understand how they are used. For example, a Button is a template that contains visuals and behaviors. You can re-define the visuals and behaviors to define your own control template and change the look and feel of the button.

Explore Control templates, Styles, Layouts, etc. to understand how low level primitives are used to create complex UI mechanisms.

4. Read, Code and understand simple samples in each area.

The EID videos, tutorials, WPF labs, Channel 9 videos, WPF Samples, etc. are a great way to start coding away at simple examples that will expand your understanding in each section of WPF.

5. Put it all together to solve a problem you care about.

Now that you understand the tool, you need to actually use it to fix all the UX issues that were too difficult to implement earlier.

6. Congratulations – You are over the WPF curve

If all this took more than a few weeks, don’t worry, you are not alone. Just make sure not to misuse all this knowledge to create UIs that suck :-)

Every version of incorporated some nice visual elements, that third party control vendors rushed to incorporate in their toolbox. Most of the elements enhanced the looks of items like toolbars, menus, etc.

However, with Office 2007, the changes have been behavioral too. The user needs to change their behavior to use Ribbon, it context sensitive tab and floating toolbars. In my case, it was couple of hours and then everything felt right in place.

Using Expression Interactive Designer and Visual Studio and navigating to their multitude of toolbox windows to set a few properties, these products could do with a strong dose of the Ribbon.

And if you are designing UIs for Desktop software, then Dennis has Windows Forms Ribbon control, which I encourage to try out.

As some one who cares about User Experience, I have been following Jensen Harris blog for some time now, but I actually wanted to use Office 2007 to do real work before commenting on UX.

I have been using PowerPoint 2007 and created couple of presentations and the UX rocks. The Ribbon brings the entire power of PowerPoint at your command. Contextual tabs and contextual translucent toolbars allow you to focus on what you are currently working on. And IGX (data driven graphics) is the icing on the cake.

This is the first version of Office that I would recommend buying since Word and Excel for Windows 3.1. Jensen’s blog details on how they went about re-designing the UI. If you do any UI or UX work, it’s a must read. If you are on the Open Office team, then you should print it out and pin it around your office.

Now only if Visual Studio, Sparkle and the other applications I use would adopt this UX.

And to folks who say Office is dead– Are you sure what you are smoking is legal?

Apple announced Base Camp, a dual boot manager for running Windows XP.

I can't figure why Apple did not support Xen - the Open Source Virtualization solution. This would allow Windows running side by side with Mac OS X and would be more useful for Mac users.

Dual boot managers were available for the PC in the 1980s, so I am not sure how this brings the Mac to the 21st century.

These folks have done a great job in documenting how VSTS helps the SDLC process. If ever there was a picture that was worth a million words, this is it. Microsoft needs to use this picture for their VSTS marketing efforts and hire these folks.