Just found out about this little tool that seemed interesting to me: Kaxaml, a lightweight xamlpad alike tool. Apparently it's also free which is always a nice thing.

I found out about this tool by navigating around on the site of Blendables, a vendor of WPF controls. And I got to know about this particular site thanks to Gill.

Grz, Kris.

Wow, this is a cool application. Be sure to check it out and have Silverlight installed. Funny thing for me is that I worked in a team in 2001 that was also into adding/upgrading a software tool for patient handling in hospitals. If we only had the UI possibilities of Silverlight/WPF in those days to work out everything...

Personally, I foresee much more of these kind of applications with these great technologies.

Grz, Kris.

One of the nice things when you gather with a bunch of tech minded people like yourself (Microsoft VIP Community Offsite 2007) is that you get to know urls to interesting tech stuff. Apparently already very known, except by me are the MSDN UK nuggets. Some small, interesting videos that highlight a specific topic in 10-15 minutes. I sure do like the idea as most webcasts are too long or they want to cover as much as possible in an as short as possible time span with as endresult that nobody gets the message.

Another one that I found related to that, and one that seems very new so most of my tech savvy friends don't know about it untill when they read my blog is this Nibbles site. It seems to only have some tutorials at the moment, especially focussed on Blend and Silverlight/WPF. As I'm keen on learning both I'll sure be checking this one out.

Grz, Kris.

No, this isn't some spam about getting your degree from university for $... This blog post is about the MIX university where you can get handson labs about WPF, Virtual Earth, ASP.NET AJAX or Vista Sidebar Gadgets. Check it out: http://www.visitmix.com/university/

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday I visited the .NET Framework 3.0 Development event provided by Microsoft. It was a great introduction to the new upcoming technologies: WPF, Cardspace, WCF and WF.

The first 2 sessions were presented by Peter Himschoot, a regional director for Belgium. The last 2 were presented by Ingo Rammer, the known Austrian regional director.

My impression: WPF looks way cool. It looks quite flexibel and the 3D effects were also looking great. Peter also showed us a WPF application running sandboxed in Internet Explorer and apparently this is called an XBAP application.

CardSpace looks promising but I still need to see it in practice. If it can live up to the expectations it could have a very bright future though.

Then Ingo showed us WCF and later on WF. This was for me the first time I saw WF in action. Boy did I wish I could already use it in my current project, it would a great time saver for the workflows I need to implement.

The last session, and also the most interesting probably, was the one where WCF and WF were used together. I just checked Ingo's blog and as he promised he uploaded the slides and demo applications. You can download them here.

Grz, Kris.

I got these via Tom Mertens' blog:

• Introducing Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), CardSpaces (previously InfoCard) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
• Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)

Grz, Kris.

I just found out about the existence of this newly dedicated site: netfx3. After blogging already about the renamed WinFX to .NET 3.0 framework name it seems Microsoft's dedicated to the new naming.

Grz, Kris.

Just read .NET Framework 3.0 at Somasegar's blog.

It's just rebranding of the name Microsoft pushed as WinFX, because behind the scenes it seems to be the same .NET 2.0 framework as we're having now, but with added value: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows CardSpace (WCS).

I'm already looking forward to .NET 4.0. Are you?

Update: another article by Brad Abrams is online too: Toward .NET Framework 3.0....

Grz, Kris.