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• Rants and Raves #2

  Posted: 01 Jul 2009 at 20:47 by Joel

  Wow, it’s been a busy few weeks since the last Rants and Raves: Silverlight Firestarter DC, CHODOTNET, RVNUG, and CodeStock (not to mention two Craft shows!) Rants Microsoft Certification Exam Along the way I have also been studying for my very first Microsoft Certification Exam, 70-536 “Microsoft .NET Framework – Application Development Foundation”. I am pursuing my Microsoft [...]

• Expression Design for Developers part 4 – Using Layers and Exporting to XAML

  Posted: 24 Jun 2009 at 19:46 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";This is the fourth entry in a series of articles intended to teach developers how to use Expression Design.  You can find the previous articles here: Expression Design for Developers part 1 – First Impressions Expression Design for Developers part 2 – A Quick Tour Expression Design for Developers part 3 – Editing Your Art In the previous [...]

• Rants and Raves #1

  Posted: 29 May 2009 at 20:14 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";I’m thinking of starting a regular feature called “Rants and Raves”.  If I do continue this down the road, then I can always look back fondly and call this the beginning.  If not, I’ll just forget it as a failed experiment.  In the meantime, maybe it will make me feel better. Rants Expression Design and Underlined [...]

• Expression Design for Developers part 3 - Editing Your Art

  Posted: 28 May 2009 at 21:04 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";At the end of part 2 of this series we had the beginnings of a new logo.  In this article we are going to learn how to edit existing art on the artboard using Guidelines and Shape editing.  We’ll also explore adding Visual Interest by using Gradients and Effects.  Here is the image we [...]

• Technical Presentation Tip - Be Confident but Humble

  Posted: 18 May 2009 at 18:48 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";Justin Etheredge at CodeThinked has asked for people to post some tips and tricks for giving Technical Presentations. His idea is great: provide a repository of Best Practices for technical presenters written by the presenters themselves. The following is my contribution to the cause. Confidence is King One thing that keeps never-before presenters from becoming [...]

• Expression Design for Developers part 2 - A Quick Tour

  Posted: 01 May 2009 at 20:36 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";In the first article of this series I laid out my initial impression of Expression Design.  In the intervening weeks I have spent a lot more time with Adobe InDesign which is a very impressive tool.  InDesign seems to be the easiest of all the tools to produce something real (and real fast).  InDesign [...]

• Geek Gadget Friday: Amazon Kindle and The Apple Store

  Posted: 24 Apr 2009 at 20:24 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";I must preface this by letting you know that I am in no way a “Gadget Geek”.  I know many of my geek brethren are, but not me.  If you want to talk power tools or musical instruments, then I am there, but I’m just not that into gadgets for the sake of gadgets.  [...]

• NoVa Code Camp Schedule Posted

  Posted: 21 Apr 2009 at 14:05 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2"; The NoVa Code Camp schedule of speakers is officially posted, and yours truly will be presenting on “Using Blend and Visual Studio Together.”  I’ve given this presentation several times and people really seem to respond.  In fact, the most frequent response I get is “I didn’t know Blend could do that!” The slate of presenters [...]

• Expression Design for Developers part 1 - First Impressions.

  Posted: 17 Apr 2009 at 19:22 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";This is the first in a series of articles intended to introduce Expression Design to fellow Developers.  If you are a professional Designer or Graphic Artist, then I humbly ask that you keep your snickers and chortles to a modest volume, and guffaws are right out. I’ve had Expression Design for over a year now, [...]

• Processing Multiline Text in a WPF TextBlock

  Posted: 23 Mar 2009 at 15:55 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";So I’m sure this will be filed in the *yawn* category for you experienced WPF developers out there, but I ran into an interesting item on Friday that I wanted to share.  I was developing a custom DialogBox that displays a lot of text and an image from a CLR object passed in from [...]

• Computer Graphics - Assignment 2

  Posted: 24 Feb 2009 at 22:43 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";As I wrote previously, my Tuesday and Thursday afternoons are currently occupied in “academic pursuits” at the local Community College.  Over the last several weeks we have been working on Assignment 2, and just this past week a follow on assignment.  I have finished both of these, so as promised here are my recent [...]

• More Fun with WPF ScrollViewer

  Posted: 17 Feb 2009 at 20:56 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";In yesterday’s post, Fun with WPF ScrollViewer, I discussed how to detect when just the scroll bar was clicked on a draggable ListBox.  Today’s episode addresses something that happened to me on the other end: Dropping into the ListBox. It probably makes sense that when a new item is dropped onto my ListBox, and therefore [...]

• Fun with the WPF ScrollViewer

  Posted: 16 Feb 2009 at 22:29 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";In my current project, I have a horizontal ListBox wrapped in a ScrollViewer.  As you might expect, this indicates that I intend to have more content than my ListBox can display at any given time.  I am also implementing Drag and Drop reordering on this same ListBox.  This seemingly average task has turned out [...]

• Roanoke Code Camp 3

  Posted: 11 Feb 2009 at 16:58 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";Roanoke Code Camp 2009 is happening in just a couple short weeks. Description from the site: The Roanoke Valley .NET User Group (RV.NUG) , with support from Microsoft, the International .NET Association (INETA) is hosting the third Roanoke Code Camp on Saturday, March 7th at Virginia Western Community College. This is an all-day, [...]

• Must have Expression Add-ins

  Posted: 11 Feb 2009 at 15:52 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";Josh Holmes recently posted a list of Three Essential Expression Add-ins.  I didn’t even know there were such things, although I can’t say I’m surprised.  One of the Add-ins is XAML Intellisense for Blend, which I was recenlty told by a friend is supposed to be part of Blend 3.  Another one is called [...]

• Simple Image cropping in Expression Design

  Posted: 09 Feb 2009 at 22:20 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";I had a case today where I wanted to crop an image, something I haven’t needed to do in some time.  In fact, the last time I had to do it was on my previous computer which had several graphics programs installed.  This time, however, the only application I have installed on this machine [...]

• Computer Graphics - Assignment 1

  Posted: 22 Jan 2009 at 21:24 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";I’ve long thought that Computer Graphics has been the missing piece in my Web design toolbox. It always seemed that the best designs had good graphics: even sites with very few or subtle graphics have a certain quality to them that I was never able to really replicate just using CSS and my [...]

• MultiBinding in WPF

  Posted: 21 Jan 2009 at 22:40 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";In my current application, I have a ListBox that displays images horizontally.  Basically it is a WPF FilmStrip (without the control) with some additional features.  One feature is a toolbar that includes navigation buttons.  First and Last buttons are easy: they are always available and always navigate to the first or last image in [...]

• LiveBlogging:Microsoft PDC - Reston

  Posted: 16 Jan 2009 at 17:45 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";Today I am attending the Microsoft Programmer Development Conference in Reston, VA. Keynote - Stephen Walthers Software + Service platform is the topic. Microsoft has spent Billions developing services, sites, and data collection services.  Speaking about Windows Azure, the new Windows Operating System. Not Windows 7, but a Cloud operting system.  Built out of thousands of [...]

• For all the Science Fiction Geeks

  Posted: 14 Jan 2009 at 21:10 by Joel

  var dzone_style="2";Completely miscellaneous, but a friend of mine posted this link on Facebook, and I had to share it for any of you Science Fiction fans out there. It is a graphic of dozens of Space Ships from science fiction shows and movies, showing them in their relative sizes to one another.  Lots of fun [...]