Yesterday, on my birthday, Rob Eisenberg and Christopher Bennage release the offical Beta version of Caliburn.

Designed to aid in the development of WPF and Silverlight applications, Caliburn implements a variety of UI patterns for solving real-world problems. Patterns that are enabled by the framework include MVC, MVP, Presentation Model (MVVM), Commands and Application Controller.

Calibrun is an attempt to simplify developing high-quality UIs in WPF and Silverlight by incorporating pretty much every known WPF-related design pattern and best practice :) In that respect, the project resembles Prism. All in all, I must say, it looks promising, and once I finish the DIY on my attic, I'll certainly take a look at it!

Josh gives a nice little demo of how to use his swanky 3D controls: ContentControl3D and Panel3D
They look pretty awesome!

This is a swell plugin for Visual Studio. If offers you some XAML productivity tools. It seems as if all us developers really like typing in hard XAML, not using the designer at all (or Blend for that matter).

MoXAML Powertoys contains the following features:

• Scrubber: this cleans up you XAML real nice by aligning properties and such.
• Google search on keywords from within VS. Nice :)
• Nested Comments are supported!

MoXaml also contains some snippets that'll enhance your life a lot. All in all, very good stuff!

After reading Silverlight 2 Update - Get the Developer Version on Ken Cox blog I tried updating the my Silverlight as well. Lo and behold, I also got the 'Your developers edition is outdated' and pretty redirect.

However, the SL homepage detected my location and showed me the error message in Dutch. That's pretty nice and all, but the text contains the wrong link, namely: http://www.microsoft.com/Silverlight which will lead you to the 'normal' Silverlight install page. Only after switching my location (luckily MS has provided a dropdown for that) to United States did I get the link to the developers edition:

Get the Silverlight 2 developers edition.

Two weeks ago, DotNetRocks had a very interesting talk with Brian Noyes, about the state of WPF and in what way companies are adopting it. They talked about the difficulties in getting this technology adopted by clients and several of the architectural intricacies of WPF.

Brian made a few interesting remarks. One of them was that he thinks people coming from an ASP.NET background have a less hard time getting to grips with the way markup and code are seperated in WPF. And I think that it's true, but ASP.NET and WPF also share that one big risk: if you're not carefull you'll end up with a very tightly coupled markup and code-behind (spaghetti). As Brian puts it:

In a perfect world, your code-behind file will contain a single line of code and that's the constructor with a call to InitializeComponent().

If only we'd live in a perfect world. All too often the coupling gets much tighter than you initially intended. Prism, on which Brian also worked, adresses some of these issues and does a good job by supporting the MVVM pattern, but even then, you're going to need some event redirecting in your code-behind.

One other thing that stuck to me was his asnwer to the question 'What are commmon mistakes people make when developing WPF application'. According to Brian, a lot of people are trying to build WPF application the same way they're doing WinForms. Dropping controls onto a form and connecting the interface to the data. This approach gets ugly very quickly in WPF, and in no way uses the architecture behind WPF to it full extent. One of the major benefits of WPF is the high level of 'seperation of concerns' you can achieve, and if you're still building the way you did in WinForms you're not leveraging this power at all.

All in all, it's a good listen! So check it out.!