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.

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.

At the the Visual Web Developer Team Blog Microsoft details a feature that is being added for deploying a Web Application Project that will allow developers to specify sections in the web.config that will be replaced depending on the build environment. 

The example they show is replacing the connectionStrings section of the web.config when building for Release.  This is an issue I bump into all the time.  This is a feature that really should have been address in the 2008 release of Visual Studio.  The fact that Microsoft is only adding it in the 2010 release and only for Web Application Projects is pretty annoying.  I want this feature for Web Site Projects.

I saw my first Zune in the wild today.  I have seen one other Zune before but I am not counting it because it was owned by a Microsoft employee. 

As I was on my way to work I saw a guy jogging through my neighborhood who had a Zune strapped to his arm.  This wasn’t a flash based Zune either it was the hard drive model.  I just felt sorry for the guy and I wondered if he had actually chosen to purchase a Zune or if it was a gift that he didn’t feel like he could exchange without hurting someone’s feelings. 

I attended our local DotNet users group meeting last night. The users group had set our own little Microsoft Launch Event for Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008. We had speakers give a presentation on each product and they were all pretty good. Because of the time constraint I didn’t learn anything new about Visual Studio 2008 but I feel like I got at least a basic introduction to both of the other products.

At the end of the meeting everyone got a set of disks with Visual Studio 2008 Standard and at least evaluation copies of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. After they handed those out they held the drawing for the regular user group give aways. Before last night the most I had ever gotten was a yellow water bottle. When they did the drawing my name came up first and I got first pick. I chose Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1. I am looking to build a new PC this year and I wasn’t sure if I would install XP or Vista. Now that I have a free Vista Ultimate I will going with Vista.