Community developer blogs

Ian Griffiths

Recent Posts

• Designing a WPF Timeline Control Part 1: Structure

  Posted: 04 Jun 2009 at 02:38

  For a change, I’m involved in an endeavour I can blog about. I’m working with Brian Randell, Matthew Adams, and Felix Corke on a project that involves building a kind of timeline control. This blog describes the thinking behind the control’s structure—WPF controls tend to end up looking very different from their equivalents in anything based on classic Win32 UI underpinnings such as Windows Forms, and I thought it might be interesting to explain how and why the differences come about.

• Oslo WPF and Silverlight Demos

  Posted: 30 Apr 2009 at 15:49

  This week I've been in Oslo, teaching a combined Silverlight and WPF course. For those of you who attended, here are the demos for download. And for those of you who didn't attend, well, you can download the demos too if you like.

• Silverlight and WriteableBitmap

  Posted: 07 Nov 2008 at 12:19

  I’ve just released a library to CodePlex that implements a feature missing from Silverlight: the ability to generate bitmaps from pixels in code at runtime. WPF provides this through its WritableBitmap class, but Silverlight 2 doesn’t have that. My SlDynamicBitmap project offers a solution. I was in

• Oslo WPF and Silverlight Demos

  Posted: 17 Oct 2008 at 15:07

  For those of you who saw me in Oslo this week, here are the Silverlight and WPFdemos for download.

• WPF Course in London

  Posted: 15 Sep 2008 at 17:57

  Shameless marketing plug alert! I’ll be teaching the Pluralsight WPF Fundamentals course in London later this month. (It runs from 29th September to 2nd October, so I guess that’s later this month and also early next month.) The course is for software developers, and offers detailed information on h

• LINQ Aggregation and Bounding Boxes

  Posted: 30 Jul 2008 at 19:56

  I recently worked on a project that included code to calculate the bounding box of a collection of rectangles. The code did more or less what you might expect – it iterated over the collection, and any time a new rectangle wasn’t contained by the current bounds, it enlarged the bounds to fit. There

• Visual State in Silverlight Control Templates

  Posted: 10 Jun 2008 at 21:38

  Silverlight 2 introduces a mechanism for customizing the dynamic aspects of a control’s appearance. This new model appeared for the first time in the recent beta 2 release, so I thought I’d take a crack at explaining it. The Role of Visual States In both Silverlight and WPF, a control’s appearance c

• Applied WPF Demos from London

  Posted: 13 May 2008 at 16:25

  My apologies to everyone who attended my WPF course in London last month - it looks like I forgot to upload the demos. I'm afraid I confused myself by putting the wrong title on the previous week's demos...until today the Silverlight demos from the previous week had a title claiming to be WPF demos.

• Deep Zoom at the BBC

  Posted: 10 May 2008 at 15:45

  The BBC has a Silverlight deep zoom app as part of the web coverage of the ‘Radio 1 Big Weekend’ event. (“Europe’s biggest free ticketed event” apparently.) If you live in the UK and have watched BBC television at all this week, you’ve probably already seen the adverts for the event itself. The deep

• Nulls and Lifting Member Access

  Posted: 13 Apr 2008 at 18:30

  Nulls can complicate code. One of the lesser known C# language features, the ?? operator, can sometimes help. This operator lets you provide an alternate value to be used in the event that an expression evaluates to null. For example: string displayName = elem.Name ?? "[Unknown]"; If elem.Name evalu

• Applied WPF Demos from London

  Posted: 03 Apr 2008 at 18:41

  Thanks to everyone who attended the Applied Silverlight course in London this week. As promised, here are the demos built during the week.

• LINQ Range Variable Oddness

  Posted: 29 Mar 2008 at 14:57

  Jon Skeet recently observed that range variables in LINQ expressions are not like other variables. A range variable is one like foobar in the following: var query = from foobar in source where foobar > 20 select foobar; Jon points out that the analogy people often draw – the iteration variable in

• C# 3.0 Lambdas and Type Inference

  Posted: 17 Mar 2008 at 16:07

  Daniel Cazzulino recently wrote a blog entry whose main focus was on building pipelines using iterators in C#. Towards the end he showed a slightly irritating problem in C# 3.0. He wanted to write this: var transformer = x => new { Original = x, Normalized = x.ToLower() }; However, the C# compile

• Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Cross Domain Bug

  Posted: 16 Mar 2008 at 15:37

  I recently ran into what appears to be a bug in Silverlight 2 Beta 1’s handling of cross-domain web service access when using a clientaccesspolicy.xml file. I’m hoping this post might save a few other people the time it took me to work out what was going on here. Here’s the executive summary: if the

• DevWeek 2008 Cross Platform Silverlight Demos

  Posted: 12 Mar 2008 at 18:40

  I just finished the Cross Platform .NET on Silverlight talk at DevWeek. Demos can be downloaded from http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/downloads/DevWeek2008XPlatDemos.zip I'm all done at DevWeek for this year. But if you want to hear more about Silverlight, I'll be teaching Pluralsight's Applied Silverli

• DevWeek 2008 Silverlight Precon Demos

  Posted: 10 Mar 2008 at 18:47

  Fritz Onion and I just finished the pre-conference 'Day of Silverlight' talk at DevWeek. Demos can be downloaded from http://www.pluralsight.com/fritz/demos/DevWeek2008DayOfSilverlightDemos.zip

• Playing Multiple Simultaneous Sounds in WPF

  Posted: 25 Jan 2008 at 11:40

  WPF’s MediaElement makes simple media playback pretty straightforward, but moving beyond the simple scenarios can sometimes raise surprising challenges. For example, I recently saw someone tripped up by the MediaElement when attempting to play several sounds concurrently. As you’ll see, one solution

• January Oslo WPF Demos

  Posted: 18 Jan 2008 at 14:38

  As promised to those of you who have just attended Pluralsight's WPF course in Oslo this week, here are the demos. Thanks for coming!

• Dare Obasanjo on C# Anonymous Types

  Posted: 04 Jan 2008 at 10:30

  Dare Obasanjo recently wrote a blog entry comparing some language features commonly associated with ‘dynamic’ languages with C# 3.0 equivalents. Towards the end is a section called “Python vs. C# 3.0: Tuples and Dynamic Typing vs. Anonymous Types and Type Inferencing.” In it, he complains that he en

• Natural Sorting in C#

  Posted: 13 Dec 2007 at 13:43

  Jeff Atwood recently posted about natural sorting. This is all about making sure that strings that contain numbers sort numerically. I’m slightly surprised to see that he wants to call it alphabetical sorting. Surely by definition, alphabetical sorting is defined by, well, the alphabet. This is an i