MattSerbinski.com

Popfly has gone offline ...

After playing around with Silverlight 2 beta some more, I have run into a few issues. A quick note about this post, I have been a WPF developer for a couple of years now so my issues may not really be issues, but rather differences between Silverlight and WPF that I find to be bothersome. I'm sure Microsoft will be working to fix some of these issues as they are minor, but there is 1 major issue that has been talked about in further detail, Silverlight's control templating model. Dr.

While things were slowing down at work, MIX 08 was starting up. I wish I could have attended but unfortunately my job takes precedence. I've been reading blog posts about MIX 08 and it sounds like it was a great time for Silverlight 2! The more I read about Silverlight 2  the more it sounded like Microsoft has finally got the ball on the road. This project (the amoeba project) was originally designed to be a Silverlight app. After digging into Silverlight 1.1, the feature set was not there yet to support our overall idea.

A quick update on this blog, I will be traveling for my job in the coming week for a few weeks and will most likely not have time to post anything. I will try to keep this blog updated as best I can in the next few weeks, but no promises. Once I get back I will continue on with my postings. Now on with this post ...

ok, so you don't need any WPF at all to actually control you computer using a wiimote, but everyone loves the simplicity of making and controlling a gui with WPF that we should use it anyway's! Plus, WPF is just cool. Anyway, using Brian Peek's Managed Library for the Wiimote (I used version 1.2.0.0) you can receive data from the wiimote about its IR coordinates (up to all 4 IR sensors now!) and all of its button states.

I'm sure almost everyone knows about the Nintendo wii. It uses a different type of controller that is a real ingenious piece of equipment. The controller is the wiimote that has some awesome sensors in it. Much more detailed information can be found at the WiiLi Wiki. There are links that describe what type of sensors the wiimote has and how it works. There are also links that describe the data the the wiimote passes to the wii.

Every WPF developer should come across these three tools at some point in their career. These tools are extremely valuable for debugging, developing, cleaning and optimizing WPF applications. I can't believe how many months I went without using these tools to their full abilities, but now I use them on a daily basis. Below is a brief description of each tool along with links to where you can download them.

Pistachio

If your just interested on the post topic feel free to skip this paragraph; just me talking about the past 3 months and what has been going on in my life. 3 months since my last post .... wow, life sure has been crazy. Not only with the holidays being crazy as usual, I also got married and went on my honeymoon!!! All of my tasks for the wedding just seemed to hit all at once and things got crazy from then on, until the wedding day of course.

Notice that when you use an expander and expand / collapse it that there is a jerkiness depending on the number of elements that you have in it. So to solve this problem you can animate the expand / collapse events that get fired to smoothly open and close. Easy, right?