July 2007 Blog Posts

Microsoft Surface - Alternative View (Parody)

Originally published on my old Charteris blog Seeing as I blogged the Behind The Scenes look at Microsoft Surface I thought it only fair to give equal attention to this very funny (IMHO) tongue-in-cheek look at Microsoft Surface. Microsoft Surface Parody on YouTube

WPF Elements and stretching to the Layout panel

Originally published on my old Charteris blog Debugging layout issues is something I had to do fairly often particularly with some of the complex layouts we were trying in the past. Trying to work out why "such and such" FrameworkElement would not stretch to the size of "whatever" layout panel I was using.  Before we get to the detail of stretching there is one simple layout, debugging technique that I think is worth sharing; It is that setting the backgrounds of all the various panels that you are using, whilst debugging, makes life much easier. Take this relatively simple layout problem Imagine if we are trying to find work out...

WPF Training Course - Part5 - Layout

Originally published on my old Charteris blog This is part 5 of the training course originally described here with parts 2,3 and 4 available here, here and here respectively. So far we have covered WPF fundamentals, XAML, brushes, shapes, controls, styling and resources. Again if anyone wants to contact me for clarifications or to talk over part of the course just use a Comment or the Contact link at the top of the page. Good luck! The details of part 5 are below, the labs and any associated code are in the download package. LAB...

Microsoft Health CUI released today

Originally published on my old Charteris blog For the last year or so I have been working on the Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) project at Microsoft and today it was released here (www.mscui.com) and on here on CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com/mscui). The work released today comes from two areas of the ongoing work that Microsoft is doing in this area. First up is Design Guidance, this is a collection of best practice user interface guidance for clinical applications. Apologies for simply quoting the website but people smarter than me came up with the words so I might as well quote them Design Guidance has...

WPF Training Course (Free) - Part4 - ResourceDictionaries, Styles and Triggers

Originally published on my old Charteris blog This is part 4 of the training course originally described here with parts 2 & 3 available here and here respectively. So far we have covered WPF fundamentals, XAML, brushes, shapes, controls and control templating. Again if anyone wants to contact me for clarifications or to talk over part of the course just use a Comment or the Contact link at the top of the page. Good luck! The details of part 4 are below, the labs and any associated code are in the download package ...

KeyCodes, CharCodes and ASP.NET AJAX

Originally published on my old Charteris blog First up this post is as much for me as it is for the person that happens upon it via a SE, this stuff is kind of confusing and I will need reminding. Secondly I am far from an expert, only recently something blindingly obvious about Key Codes and why they are called key codes was point out to me. Thanks Richard. KeyCode vs CharCode A KeyCode is a not a code for a specific character; for instance the same code is returned whether or not it’s character is UPPER or lower case. The KeyCode...