Since my focus is shifting from WPF to other technologies, I've decided to drop the name 'The Daily WPF' next month. So, the URL's 'dailywpf.com' and 'dailywpf.nl' will no longer be available from December 12. 2009.

This weblog will be available through blog.rubensteins.nl for now (until I find a new name), so update your bookmarks accordingly.

Thanks!
Ruben

Are you still being forced to use Visual Studio 2005? How about making a business case for VS 2008 or VS 2010 by showing your manager this Visual Studio Myth-busting Matrix that neatly sums up all the pros of upgrading to a modern version of our favourite IDE.





WPF-folks should be really looking forward to 2010 with it's swanky desingers and WPF startpage!

If you've allready downloaded the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and you feel the Silverlight and WPF designers load slowly, you might want to check out the post

"Improving the Start-up Performance of the WPF and Silverlight Designer in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2".

Charles Petzold has posted yet another cool WPF post on his blog. The Random Globules Application in Silverlight has a mesmerizing effect:



What I like most about Petzold's posts is that he always goes the extra mile in explaining all about the fancy algorithms he's used to achieve his results:

To keep them simple, I decided that each globule would be a three-segment quadratic Bezier curve, defined by six points — alternating curve points and control points. To keep the circumference of the composite curve smooth, each pair of control points and the curve point between them should be colinear, that is, lie on the same line.

Although there was no talk about WPF at the SO DevDays, I want to share my impressions with you. Since there were no breakout sessions I could go to every talk, so I will discuss each of them briefly:

1) 9:00 - 9:50 Joel Spolsky - Opening Keynote
This was a great talk about simplicity in software. I heard a lot of things I'd already read in 'The Design of Everyday Things' ,'Why Software Sucks' and Joel’s own blog, but it was entertaining nevertheless (I swear I heard the 'dog in a towel' gag before...). Spolsky is an engaging speaker and with his track record I'd listen to him even if he wasn't!

2) 9:50 - 10:50 Jörn Zaefferer - jQuery
Although I was looking forward to this the talk itself was quite a disappointment. The sound was pretty bad and Jörn accent didn't help in that regard. After a promising intro, we got a detailed overview of each and every API in jQuery - not very interesting.

3) 11:10 - 12:10 Eero Bragge - Qt
Again a speaker with a rather thick accent, but the talk was much more entertaining; Qt is really an existing platform and I might even give it a try someday. At least I installed the Qt Designer on my laptop. What Qt has working for it, is platform independency. The Mono team still refuses to implement WPF, so if you want to be able to deploy on Linux and Mac, Qt really seems a nice alternative, even though it means programming in unmanaged C++.

4) 12:10 - 12:40 Joel Spolsky - Fogbugz
Next came Joel again, with a promo for Fogbugz. Since I don't own a software shop I wasn't really interested, so I used this time (and the excellent Wifi) to download the Qt stuff :P FogBugz still looks nice as far as these things go...

5) 12:40 - 13:30 Lunch
Lunch was okay. I was lucky to grad a sandwich before the line formed, but when I wanted to get another one (after the line had dissolved) all that remained were 'pains au chocolat' and bananas. Ah well...

6) 13:30 - 14:30 Simon Willison - Python
After seeing this guy hack his way at the iPython console I really was inspired to pick up this nice dynamic language. So, in the coming weeks, I'll be looking at IronPython again - or maybe Python together with PyQt... who knows ;)

7) 14:30 - 15:30 Nick Johnson - Google App Engine
This talk was okay. The topic was interesting enough -and the word 'cloud' was never uttered during the presentation- but somehow it didn't manage to persuade me. There was some marketing bs, but mostly it gave an adequate overview of the appEngine.

8) 15:50 - 16:50 Christian Heilmann - Yahoo! Developer Tools
YQL and the Yahoo! devtools are surely worth checking out. Heilmann really did an excellent job, especially if you take into consideration he as recovering from a bad case of the flu. The guy is funny and knows his stuff. If you want to make a mashup you might want to check out if there's a YQL endpoint available!

9) 16:50 - 17:50 Alex Thissen - ASP.NET-MVC
Since I'm quite taken by the APS.NET MVC framework I was curious to see what Alex would be talking about. He gave a broad (and therefore shallow) overview of the framework. This was certainly not the best talk of the day, and I don't think he managed to convince the MS-skeptic crowd that MVC was worth their time, even though his demo was pretty good.

All in all, the DevDays were certainly worth the 80+ euro's I paid for it; the venue was nice, although a rather chilly :-) See you next year SO DevDays!