The more I use WPF, the more I’m impressed and confounded by it. Impressed because it is really well-designed, thoughtful, and quite rich right out of the gate; I’m confounded by the things it’s lacking. I realize they had to ship something sooner than later, but some of the things Microsoft left out seem pretty trivial to implement given what I know about WPF. One of these is an auto-completing TextBox (It was even late to the Windows forms party, but still…). The most famous example is the address ComboBox in the browser. Start typing to see that the computer remembers what you typed previously. Auto-complete is everywhere in the OS, and you can see it on the web in spots too, now: Compose a message in Facebook and you’ll see your contact list drop down and filter out as you type. Read more »

Posted in .NET, Missing .NET, Software | 3 Comments »

No one who knows me would describe me as humble. I guess if everyone thinks I’m not humble, maybe I’m not, I don’t know. One thing I do approach with humility is my ability as a programmer. It took some concentration to “get” the fancy algorithms in university; I’d always try to solve the problem [...] Read more »

Posted in .NET, Rants | 5 Comments »

One of the sad, unfortunate truths about Windows Forms development is that you don’t get to use it. That’s right: LINQ, WCF, WPF, maybe even generics, iterators, and the awesomest Winforms control ever, ToolStrip. All of it may be off limits to you, dear WinForms developer, because real people don’t know what the .NET framework is, and don’t care that your app depends on it; nor are they willing to sit through a 24 MB download, apparently. That last one seems really weird to me, a broadband user for 8 years, but, the numbers don’t lie: your users don’t have the framework on their computers. Now, there is hope with Vista — if Microsoft could just advertise it better so everyone’s perception of it isn’t that it sucks balls; it has .NET 3.0 installed by default, but .NET 3.5? Still a separate download. Read more »

Posted in Missing .NET | 4 Comments »

One of the subtle UI improvements we’ve seen over the past few windows versions, and on the web, is the cue banner, or text prompt. They are hardly groundbreaking — putting them in your app probably won’t win you awards, but they do serve to make your applications that much more polished and usable. Read more »

Posted in Missing .NET | 13 Comments »

For years, I thought I had the one, true answer to Equals() from seeing something in some MSDN article a long, long time ago – like 2002 or 2003. Or maybe it was on Brad’s or Krystof’s blog and freaked out because I wasn’t doing it. Whatever the case, I’d make sure to point out [...] Read more »

Posted in .NET, Software | 2 Comments »