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Online WPF training from Microsoft October 29, 2007

Posted by James Webster in : development, windows , add a comment

One of the development technologies on my list of things to learn about is Windows Presentation Foundation. Through the blog of Tim Sneath, one of the chief WPF technology advocates, it has been announced that Microsoft is making an online WPF course available; WPF Bootcamp. Will definitely be worth checking it out when I have the time to indulge such pursuits without feeling guilty about neglecting other tasks I should be working on.

Speaking of which, the reason for the distinct lack of posting around here lately is due to having just finished an assignment for the Financial Analysis and Valuation subject in the Graduate Diploma of Applied Finance and Investment I am studying. Hopefully some better time management practices may result in an increase in news and opinion from me!

The Windows Forms Data Grid Conspiracy Theory March 11, 2007

Posted by James Webster in : development, windows , 2 comments

Although my most recent development experience has been with Java, I have also done some .NET work in the past building Windows Forms applications. I’m keen to go back to that in the future as I find there is an immediate and tactile quality to building a GUI application that you don’t get from building a web application, AJAXified or not. I’ve been keeping a close watch on the new Windows GUI technologies, WPF, WPF/E, XBAP, etc. I was interested to see that Xceed have released a free (as in beer) WPF Data Grid component. Infragistics have also released a preview of their WPF-enabled NetAdvantage suite, which includes a grid. That’s pretty handy as it appears that Microsoft have yet to provide a WPF-specifc DataGrid. Which reminded me of my Windows Forms Data Grid Conspiracy Theory…

Pretty much all of the .NET Windows Forms applications that I have built involved a grid at some point. I have another theory that for a large majority of financial applications what the users would really be happy with, from a user interface perspective, is Excel! ‘Databases are rocks, spreadsheets are water’. The DataGrid provided with Windows Forms has a pretty minimal feature set and is limited primarily to binding with ADO.NET DataSets. Some minor improvements were made in .NET 2.0 but in my experience most projects end up selecting a component from a vendor such as Syncfusion, Xceed and Infragistics that provides extensive features above and beyond those provided by the built-in DataGrid.

Now for the conspiracy theory… I believe that once a year, each of the companies building DataGrid components dispatch a representative to Redmond. They all meet in some dark corner of the Microsoft campus. Behind locked doors and bathed in the light of flickering candles they start working on ‘The List’. The List is the definitive list of features that any developer could ever possibly want from a custom DataGrid. Once The List has been completed and agreed upon, The Assignment begins. The List is fed into a custom algorithm which balances each feature against a number of factors; difficulty to implement, how obviously necessary it is, how fancy or obscure it is. And after much computation each representative is provided with ‘The Sublist’, the list of features that they will implement which has a minimum of overlap with any other DataGrid vendor.

At least, this is MY theory because I struggled to find a custom DataGrid that would support all of the features I needed!

OSS P2V 4 free via G4U November 13, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : apple, virtualization, windows , add a comment

That title is bit of a mouthful… let me explain myself.

One of the big ideas in the world of virtualization is P2V or Physical-to-Virtual. One of the barriers to taking advantage of virtualization technology in your data-centre is the time spent setting up your new virtual machines, running under VMware Server or Xen or what-have-you, to mimic the physical machines they are replacing on one bigger, beefier (and hopefully more energy efficient) server. P2V technology aims to make it easy to migrate a complete physical server, with the OS and applications intact, to a virtual machine. The major players in the virtualization and backup space all have P2V solutions generally priced for the enterprise end of town.

Since Apple’s move to Intel architecture we have seen a few virtualization solutions for Mac OS X pop up; first from Parallels and most recently from VMware. This has made it easier for people to switch from Windows to Mac OS X knowing that they have a way to keep working with applications that do not have an OS X equivalent. At the same time though, I expect that many may resist simply because of the time needed to switch all applications from a Windows laptop to an Apple MacBook. So I got to wondering, what if there was a cheap way to go P2V from a laptop running XP to a Parallels Desktop XP virtual machine? Read on to find out how.