Electric Rain has a product coming out next month that I’ve been waiting anxiously for. I would have like to have written it myself, but time has always been my biggest limitation. Convexion is a Microsoft PowerPoint to Silverlight or WPF converter. Basically it will take a PowerPoint presentation, and will generate the XAML-based slides for replay in Silverlight or WPF. Take a look. More...

I worked on them all day today, and managed to get my Desert Code Camp presentations produced in video format, and uploaded to my Amazon S3 media store. I am initially making available videos in Windows Media Player format. I’m also going to produce the videos in an iPhone/iPod format, just in case anyone wants to use those. Look for those to be available tomorrow morning as I’m going to run the production process over night. More...

Desert Code Camp is coming up on Saturday June 13th. I’m pretty excited about this one because I’m going to present for the first time. I’m actually diving in deep because there are quite a few subjects that I want to speak about. The four sessions that I have proposed are below. More...

I’ve done a few WPF projects now and have gained some good experiences with using ClickOnce as a deployment technology. ClickOnce works very well when you’re packaging and deploying through Visual Studio, but it gets very counterintuitive when trying to produce real software products. My main problem with it is that Visual Studio only builds. It’s good at building. You write code and build it. However, real software products that might be built with Visual Studio, are packaged. Packaged applications have help files and other files. Plus, modern applications are modular, meaning that modules are not necessarily statically linked with a product and need to be added to the software package during the build process. So ClickOnce/Visual Studio tend to fail when dealing with packaging software products, which is what I try to do.

To get around this problem, I took a deep look into how Visual Studio published ClickOnce applications, and stole some code from another Microsoft tool that will allow me to package software products using MSBuild and support ClickOnce delivery of my software products as well, all while only requiring a since custom MSBuild task. More...

When I originally created the Composite WPF Shell project on CodePlex, I initially put the project and source code under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). However, after a bit of reflection this week on the proper licensing model for this project another open source project that I’m going to be announcing shortly, I decided that the CDDL was not the correct license to use for the Composite WPF Shell project. More...

About a month ago, David Pallman, the leader of the Custom Application Development Practice Council at Neudesic, issued a call to action for more Neudesic consultants to give back to the community through open source CodePlex projects. So I answered his call, and I seem to be the only one at the moment. Nevertheless, I started the Composite WPF Shell project. Check it out. More...

On Thursday I took the Microsoft Technical Specialist certification exam for Windows Presentation Foundation. It was a very tough test. I think it was tougher than the .NET 2.0 Foundation exam which I took last year. I was interested in taking the exam to see if I knew as much as I thought that I did, and I thought that it would be a good marketing thing for the Phoenix Neudesic office to be able to claim at least one WPF-capable consultant in the office. I got an 88% on the test which is a lot better than I thought that I did. More...