MyVerbalOutlet

I have yet to run to into a usable program written in WPF. I tried another one out this morning and it barely ran. Is there a WPF based application that isn’t a mess?

The most notable WPF program that I have tried is the twitter client blu by thirteen23.com. It seems like the only WPF programs I have come across are twitter clients.

Most of the WPF programs I have tried seem to have the following issues in common that make them unusable for me personally.

1. There don’t seem to be any keyboard shortcuts which drives me nuts.
2. The font sizes are to small and the fonts look awful, they are blurry and hard to read.
3. The interface design is way over the top, yet poorly implement. Interface elements will overlap and don’t layout correctly.

The first and third items in my list seem like they should be blamed on the developers but I have never seen a program developed for another platform with these issues. Number 2 should be blamed on WPF as I believe there is a framework fix for this coming in the next version of .Net.

These problems make me inclined to avoid trying to use anything written in WPF and to certainly avoid trying to develop anything with it.

Example C# IDataContext interface

    public interface IDataContext {
        System.Data.Linq.DataContext Context { get; }
        void SubmitChanges();
    }

I spent some time yesterday watching the demo portion of the Google Wave product introduction. I was very impressed with it and I am excited to get my hands on it and try it out later this year. Having Email, IM, and document sharing rolled into one web application is going to be a big win.

My second thought about Google Wave though is that it will be a serious competitor to 37Signals products. I can see it supplanting Backpack and Campfire.

For some reason Microsoft bloggers can’t post proper screenshots.  There are several ways that screenshots are made available on the web.  Most screenshots are displayed as a small linked image.  When you click on the image you either get the full image on a new page or the image loads on the current page using the javascript lightbox effect.  Many Microsoft bloggers only post the small image so you can’t actually see any details in the screenshot.  I have really noticed this is the case with with the blogs on the weblogs.asp.net domain.  I don’t know if the software they use to power those blogs doesn’t allow linking full size images or if they just don’t know how to do it properly but it is really annoying.

I have read several posts from Microsoft bloggers recently where they included small screenshots that weren’t large enough to discern details and didn’t include links to larger versions.  One such post was about the the next version of Visual Studio and how the editor component will use WPF.  This kind of post where a great deal of information could best be conveyed visually but isn’t really makes me wonder whether or not Microsoft understands how to interact properly with an audience on the web.

Microsoft employees if you are going to include screenshots include a link to a full size image. It really annoys me when you want to promote something but then you don’t include the necessary visual elements to allow your audience to properly comprehend the information you are trying to convey.

I changed out my WordPress theme again. I wanted a theme that would render faster than the one I was using. I haven’t spent much time tweaking the layout yet but I will probably play with it as I get time.