Oare bancile sug?

Mda deci saptamana trecuta am fost la niste cumparaturi la Penny Market. Am vrut sa platesc cu cardul ca sa-mi ajunga banii cash si pentru alte cumparaturi…

Timpul chiar e relativ?

In seara asta ma simt putin mai filosofic.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,800 times in 2010. That’s about 7 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 9 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 31 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 6mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was June 7th with 185 views. The most popular post that day was Force WPF to update UI.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were 10rem.net, google.co.in, Google Reader, google.com, and mail.yahoo.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for doubleanimationusingkeyframes, wpf animation, make animation in button wpf, wpf update ui, and ienumerable contains.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Force WPF to update UI June 2010
1 comment

2

WPF Animation using DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames March 2010
3 comments

3

Working with ICollection/List/IEnumerable that contain custom classes June 2010
1 comment

4

Writing Converters for WPF applications April 2010

5

Silveright 3D VS WPF 3D May 2010

Working with ICollection/List/IEnumerable that contain custom classes

Again, about my Twitter Client. I’ve made a custom class show the tweet and then a ICollection for the public property of the Tweets in the TwitterViewModel.

Force WPF to update UI

I’ve recently posted a Twitter Client to codeplex.com and I’ve been frustrated that I can’t seem to manually update when the tweet was posted. So I’ve started thinking a came up with this solution.

Silveright 3D VS WPF 3D

These days I’ve been messing around with Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone and I’ve noticed that the animation in the Phone List Application are pretty awesome so I’ve looked deeper into the bowels of the app and found out that it’s made using Projections. Basically it projects something into 3D space. Pretty nice for 3D-like applications. In this blog post I will add more as I find more interesting stuff to post. So far I know that you can’t project things in WPF. I’ll try to find out how to do it properly in Silverlight, then try it in WPF.

Stay tuned. More to come…

Writing Converters for WPF applications

I’m currently writing my own Twitter client (yes, I know, another Twitter client will hit the market. Whoopee!) and I had to create a converter that turns a regular string to some kind of a rich text box with link’s and that kind of stuff. The algorithm is in my head just need to implement. That would be my greatest achievement yet. But let’s not go adrift from the subject. Writing your own converter for your app.

First you need to know is your input and what would be your output (that’s essentially what a converter is: take some input, does some work with and then returns an output). WPF has some very basic converters built-in: String to Color, String to Bool and many more that I have no idea where there are or how they work. I know that the XAML parser uses converters a lot. Some WPF developer I am. But anyway. Let’s get to the point.

Introducing Feed Tracker

Introducing Feed Tracker, my first WPF application.

Feed tracker let’s you track your RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds. Just add your feed and stay updated.

Features:

• Can read RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds.

New features to come:

• Multithreading support.
• Older RSS versions support.
• New UI.

You can get Feed Tracker to install via ClickOnce here.

Codeplex source: http://feedtracker.codeplex.com

Can’t wait for some feedback.

Writing a RSS feed reader – Day One

I was literally thinking about what should be my first WPF app. As Pete Brown said in one of his articles you need to find a good starting app to get familiar with the technology. First I wanted to create an old (undone) app of mine made in WinForms, but it was a bit to complicated for WinForms also so I decide to go with a RSS feed reader.

Started Googleing for some demo apps to illustrate how to start with this kind of app but didn’t find anything that I liked.

After that I searched how to read RSS feed. I found that you can load the feed into an XDocument (System.Xml.Linq.XDocument) and get your info from there if you know how to work with xml files. The problem was that not all feeds have the same format. ‘Great!’ I thought another app goes to the dustbin, but I didn’t want to give up that easily and found out that .NET has a special namespace that can handle Syndication feeds like RSS and Atom: System.ServiceModel.Syndication. In this namespace I found the SyndicationFeed class and from there I can use it to read the feed. Great stuff!

After all of this I started to think how the hell I’m going to store my feeds. After a great amount of thinking I found out that storing them into the App Settings was the best way to do it. One more problem solved. Another problem comes up. I need to store both the feed title and the feed address for later use. Great another problem arose. Started to store the feed title and the feed address into the same setting and them split them using the String.Split method but that proved ineffective for the following reason: I used ‘_’ (underscore) as the split char, but that isn’t recommended because what happens when the feed title or the feed address contains an underscore. I would’ve got an IndexOutOfRange at best or worse incorrectly formatted strings in my settings.

How to solve this issue? Simple: put the title and the address on two separate settings and then use the StringCollection (System.Collections.Specialized) class’s IndexOf method to get the index of the title and them retrieve the address at the same index (as you add the feed title and feed address at the same time in the settings, you wont get mix-up indexes). After solving all of these issues is time to figure out how to populate the feed list, get the feeds and display them somewhere. I’m at this stage of development. Multi-threading will be involved as it takes some time to get the feed from the web. Error-handling will be somewhat painful but who said that this kind of app will be easy?

As I get a working alpha of my app I’ll post it on Google Project or Codeplex or maybe both and get some user feedback.

Here are some previews:

UI mock-up (will be restyled)

Code so far…

Code so far… II

Looking forward for some feedback.

Fake OS in WPF

Have you ever wondered how do some movies have such cool OS themes and such? Well I have and I think I found out how they do it. It’s either flash or how I’m trying to do it in WPF. WPFs easy ability to customize UI and pretty much everything else helps you to achieve this. I’ll try to come up with some UI and some working stuff.

This will be a perfect excuse to dive into Styling, Themes and such in WPF. It’ll be a learning experience for me as well, as I’m a relative new user to the technology. Stay tuned.