James Gaskin at NetworkWorld gives a well-referenced response very similar to the one I gave back then, which went like this:

Essentially, whenever some field of AI achieves a result, the successful work is given a name (intelligent search, [something] recognition, adaptive [something], smart [something], etc.), it leaves the lab, has an impact on industry / research / our lives, and “Artificial Intelligence” remains loosely defined as “the tough cognition problems we haven’t solved yet.”

Mind you, even defined in that way, Marvin Minsky would probably still agree that the creators of AI really need to get a hustle on.

To sum up, XAML obfuscation is a bit of a quagmire.  I haven’t found a tool (let alone a build pipeline) that would make it easy to obfuscate production XAML code, which some consulting clients certainly would prefer.  I’ll be interested in the results of Rudi’s investigation.

The other side of the coin is that because WPF apps are hard to obfuscate, studying code in order to learn (rather than to “liberate” is also possible.)  I have really valued using tools like Reflector to learn good WPF practices from the experts.  As I mentioned before, Expression Blend, which is a WPF app itself, has been a real inspiration because the Blend team has solved some really hard problems while building Blend.

After enjoying the process of training a team of developers and designers to use WPF, this course is the result of turning that material into a course that we could offer here.

My goal is to give participants in the course the base knowledge and pointers they need to build WPF apps. I’ll also position WPF relative to other presentation layer technologies (such as WPF’s little brother Silverlight), and demonstrate practices that have been useful to me in development I’ve done for my clients.

The inaugural course offering is scheduled for August 11th-13th. [corrected 17 June] If you’re interested in taking part, please find more information about the course on ObjectSharp’s site. Also, if August 13th is too long for you to wait, or you’re interested in an on-site course, please contact me, or Julie James, ObjectSharp’s Training Manager.

Great Snippets: Great code snippets I have installed into my Visual Studio for WPF development are the Dr Wpf and Nerd+Art snippet packs.

WPF Coding Conventions: The coding guidelines I use for WPF are a riff on Paul Stovell’s XAML and WPF Coding Guidelines.

Application Quality Guide: There’s a WPF Application Quality Guide in the works. More information at WindowsClient.net.

Avalon Healthcare Demo: Still my favourite WPF Line-of-Business App Demo. Code available here.

Prism: Think CAB (or SCSF) for WPF, re-built from the ground up to learn from past Composite UI frameworks. There are drops available on Codeplex. Brian Noyes, a contributor, has a great summary here.

WPF/Silverlight shared code: Someone asked about sharing code between WPF and Silverlight. While I think it’s more skills than code that you’ll actually be sharing, here’s a good example in Delay’s blog of actual code being re-used bewteen the two frameworks.

hope that helps,
Rob

* minus the holography bits. although maybe some awesome researcher could come up with a way to render these hybrid WPF/DX UIs onto a hologram.

** if you just want the cool demos, do as the Channel 9 page suggests - fast forward the video to about 5 or 6 minutes along.

*** who’s in?

Download it here.

Some notes:

• This solution requires that you have Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta installed.
• This also requires that you have the DXSDK installed on your PC (I am out-of-date and using the August 2007 flavor)
• In my .sln, a Pre-build Event Command invokes fxc.exe to compile ColorComplementShader.fx into ColorComplementShader.ps. The Pre-build command requires you to have the DXSDK_DIR environment variable set (see previous note - installing the DXSDK should set this automatically for you)
• The picshure is from teh awesum icanhascheezburger.com

Next step… databound shader parameters

Download sample solution.

[14 May 08 Update: Greg has posted an end-to-end shader sample with 3 sample shaders!]

Tim Sneath’s blog entry has fantastic detail about what’s coming in this release and all the download/update details (Silverlighters developing using 2.0 Beta: see caveat below).

Folks attending my “WPF for Line Of Business apps” presentation on Thursday will be happy to hear about the new WPF controls, like the DataGrid, Ribbon and WebBrowser. (Silverlight, it seems, has been a good influence on big brother WPF.) They’ll also value the performance improvements, the new “Client Profile” that can reduce the size of the .NET framework required for deployment, and the little-but-very-useful things like support for string formatting for data-bound text.

Me, I am also utterly stoked about the shader support, the D3DImage, and improvements to WriteableBitmap. Greg Schechter is walking us through the details on his blog.

I am going to check this stuff out this week and promise to demo what I can at my DevTeach presentation on Thursday!

Important caveat: When Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 Betas went live last week, I didn’t update my dev box because the SP1 Beta release is incompatible with Silverlight 2 Beta 1 development. This will be resolved for Silverlight 2 Beta 2, which is imminent - so I’m going to make the update, get a VPC ready for Silverlight development, and start playing with WPF development on my main box now.

Let me explain by reduction to an absurd example:

Say I have a command that can only execute when

DateTime.Now.Second % 2 == 0.

I construct this command by home-brewing a static RoutedCommand instance:

And then I add a Command Binding for that command to my Window, and assign the command to a Button:

<Window x:Class=”TestCommands.Window1″…>
<Window.CommandBindings>
<CommandBinding
Command=”{x:Static local:Commands.MyCommand}”
Executed=”MyCommandExecuted”
CanExecute=”MyCommandCanExecute”
/>
</Window.CommandBindings>
…
<Button Width=”200″ Height=”200″
Command=”{x:Static local:Commands.MyCommand}”
Content=”{Binding Path=IsEnabled}”
/>
…
</Window>

By nature of WPF’s awesomeness and WPF Commanding in general, the above Button’s IsEnabled property should automatically be set to true or false based on whether or not the command can or can’t be executed.

Speaking of which, let’s set up my Command’s absurd logic in the CodeBehind by implementing its Execute and CanExecute event handlers:

So, my example is absurd but I bet you see my point by now: WPF is meant to automatically set the IsEnabled Property on that button to true or false, based on the results of the CanExecute method. But in this case, the results of CanExecute are a function only of time, and thus change repeatedly and independently of “obvious” application events. So… how does the Commanding system know when to query CanExecute and consequently enable/disable the button once a second?

In this case, without further intervention, it doesn’t. It seems that when events are raised on the Window (a mouse button click, etc.), CanExecute is re-evaluated. (I don’t know the details and wish I did.)  But, without further programmatic or user intervention, the button will not automatically change its IsEnabled state once a second.

This led me back to the MSDN docs, where I discovered the aptly-named InvalidateRequerySuggested event. To coerce - er, suggest - that WPF should query CanExecute, I set up the following DispatcherTimer:

Now, the IsEnabled property of the Button blinks on and off as the Command’s ability to be executed changes with the passing seconds.

Only then did I discover there’s an MSDN Docs sample called “Disable Command Source Via Dispatcher Timer Sample” which is remarkably similar.

There you have it. Now go forth and command WPF’s Commanding. I’m sure you can all execute on that request <g>

P.S. Code for this sample is here.

P.P.S. What are folks using for pasting XAML and C# code into their blogs? This entry is looking a little rough…

Perforator: for analyzing rendering behavior.

Visual Profiler: for profiling the use of WPF services, such as layout and event handling, by elements in the visual tree.

Working Set Analyzer: for analyzing the working set characteristics of your application.

Event Trace: for analyzing events and generating event log files.

ETW Trace Viewer: Record, display, and browse Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) log files in a WPF user-interface format.

The WPF Performance Suite can either be found online or in your Windows SDK Directory at [WinSDK]\bin (mine was at c:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Bin).

This weekend, 10 minutes with the WPF Performance Suite boosted my application’s FPS (frames per second) dramatically.  I had made an incorrect assumption about why my performance was degrading (I thought it was prolific use of texture memory, but it turned out that a textbox related to debug spew that was running wild).  The Visual Profiler revealed this to me immediately.

So, don’t forget the WPF Performance Suite.  It makes a very useful addition to your dev/test arsenal in addition to more traditional static/dynamic analysis tools like those found in Visual Studio Team Suite.

If you’re reading this from Canada, you know Mike: the contractor who arrives at botched renovation jobs and works his magic.

So why do I love this guy?

1. He knows everything there is to know about construction. He seems to have deep knowledge of every subdomain of home renovation. It’s knowledge (and wisdom) that can only come from years of experience.

2. His mantra is “Make it right [the first time].” Fellow software developers, need I say more?

3. The concept for his show is an entrepreneur’s dream.

Take an existing idea: shows about home renovation, which are a dime a dozen.

Make a clever addition: start on a site where the contractors screwed up.

Suddenly, look at this innovative format you’ve got:

a show with conflict (in the dramatic sense only - Mike has a policy of not naming and shaming)

episodic story arcs that are much more engaging

(most importantly) a useful tweak to the format that gives Mike and his crews ample opportunity to relay relevant information about a reno to the audience, without relying on awkward asides.

More information: Check out the Holmes on Homes Website.