During my visit to the DevDays I attended five sessions, of which I allready discussed two in my previous post (the ones by Platt). The other three sessions were
* Advanced Debugging with Visual Studio 2008 - Ingo Rammer
* Building a Silverlight 2.0 Application End-To-End - Peter Himschoot
* Five Cool Things to Know and Use for Smart Client Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - Daniel Moth

Both the session about advanced debugging and the "5 cool things..." didn't really involve WPF all that much (although Daniel gave a demonstration of how easy the WinForms-WPF interop API was).

Peter Himshoots' session was interesting. He created a complete Silverlight application in 1 hour and 10 minutes. Although the session was ranked at level 300 most of it was fairly basic stuff and pretty easy to follow along. Nevertheless, his talk was lively and he kept the audience entertained as he 'tokkeled' in his app, which involved a Belgian beers database with Deep Zoom functionality.

Luckily Peter has posted the presentation and the video of that session at his SkyDrive, so you can download and watch them.

Yesterday I had to pleasant opportunity to watch two lectures –or should I say rants- by David S. Platt, author of ‘Why Software Sucks’ at DevDays 2008 in Amstedam. The first one was called exactly that. He really challenged the developer audience to make software that ‘Just Works’. Or, in his own words “Your user doesn’t want to use your software, he wants to HAVE USED your software.” The software should solve a users’ problem with as little friction as possible, which is an ecellent insight if you ask me.

The second session more or less built on to the previous one but explicitly focussed on ‘Using WPF for Good rather then Evil’. Platt pondered on several of the powerfull features WPF offers to developers and designers and showed good and ‘evil’ examples of them being used. The key point was: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” Using WPF purely as eye-candy and sticking gradients and animations all over the place doesn’t increase the quality of your application by one bit. The user most probably cannot get his or her job done more quickly and since he is not interested in you application but in what it offers, he’s not going to admire all the effort you have put into creating a fancy interface.

Now, in this regard I agree with Mr. Platt wholehartedly. To add the Spidereman cliché: “With great power comes great responsibility”. Use WPF in such a way that those powerfull features actully add usability and thus value to your program. Off course users want a clean, smooth-looking easy-to-use interface, but only if it helps them to get their job done. If your program doesn’t work well, but some other developers butt-ugly WinForms battleship grey app will, you’ve allready lost your customer.

Obviously I have to watch out to not become a David S. Platt evangelist overnight, but I must admit, the man talks sense! There was a camera present and a live-stream available online, so I hope there will be a on-demand stream or download as well soon!

The static SystemParameters class (which is contained within the PresentationFramework.dll) is a collection of about 150 properties you can retrieve information about the current environment from. It also specifies a ResourceKey for each of those, so you can use them for instance as a Dynamic Resource:

<Setter Property = "Height" Value= "{DynamicResource {x:Static SystemParameters.CaptionHeightKey}}"/>

Most of these properties are aimed at getting specific Display or UI information, such as the height of the Captionbar of the application window (CaptionHeight), or that of the menubar (MenuBarHeight). You can also retrieve a lot of the settings a user might have set for performance or esthetical reasons, such as the dropshadows and menu fading. Finally there’s a lot of information about the system itself or the way it’s setup: IsSlowMachine lets you know the whether or not the machine has a low-end processor, IsRemoteSession indicates whether or not the user is connected through a Remote Desktop or Teminal Services and IsMousePresent shows you if a mouse is connected to the system.

The entire list of available properties you can find at the SystemParamters MSDN-entry

SilverlightCream.com offers a great Blog aggregation of plenty of Silverlight content! An excellend source of info.

Kevin McNeish has written a nice tutorial about recreating the iPhone interface in WPF using Blend. The article was published in Code Magazine earlier.

Btw, I've started working on my entry for Josh Smith's Podder skin contest. I'll keep you informed about my progress. So far it's pretty plain (as in completely white :P).