May 2009 - Posts
I love Twitter. Like many users I have moved away from the website to a client application (Powerful software, combined with the cloud – sound familiar?).
I used to tweet using TweetDeck and twhirl which can be loaded on every PC, Mac or Ubuntu machine. However, being a .NET and WPF guy, there are a few things that bug me about most Twitter clients.
- Most of the Twitter clients run in AIR, being a great cross-platform (I use Windows only) light-weight (not so light) applications. I’m sure the amazing .NET community can do it better.
- Being a cross-platform application, they give up all the great Windows stuff, especially Windows 7.
- Being a .NET guy, I’m partial to apps that are build with .NET, especially WPF, and I would love to see a Twitter client written in WPF or Silverlight.
Now, the only solution to my bothers is the developer community to want it happen. They got the power. This brings us to digiTweet.
digiTweet is an Open Source project, sponsored initially by my team at Microsoft Canada in conjunction with friends at Digiflare.
DigiTweet is obviously a desktop application for Twitter. It is built completely using .NET technologies and takes particular advantage of the power of WPF. Additionally, DigiTweet will be implementing several Windows 7 specific features in the coming weeks.
You can sneak preview it on flickr.
Why do we need another Twitter client? I think that a WPF powered application, combined with the power of Windows can provide Twitter users with an amazing experience.
This is why the DigiTweet application is an open source project at Codeplex. It brings many innovative developers to contribute to making this the best Twitter client for Windows (and hopefully showcase what WPF can do along the way).
So, give digiTweet a try. More importantly, download the code and try make it better.
You can also follow digiTweet’s progress on Twitter @digi_tweet.
Janiv.
Microsoft has published MSDN docs that are scoped only for WPF 4.0.
Want fast WPF help (from the WPF SDK team members) without an internet connection?
Download the WPF CHM.
IMPORTANT! If you open the CHM and cannot view content, do the following to resolve the issue:
- Right-click the CHM file, and then click "Properties".
- Click "Unblock".
- Double-click the .chm file to open the file.
Janiv.
Great news.
Beta 1, which has been available to MSDN subscribers since Monday, is now available to everyone.
You can download the following installations from the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta Homepage:
Visual Studio Team System 2010 Team Suite Beta 1
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1
Visual Studio 2010 Professional Beta 1
.NET Framework 4 Beta 1
You can find a detailed walk through of Beta 1 here (by Jason Zander).
This beta does have full setup available so you can provision it yourself. The product is designed to work cleanly with VS2008, however like any pre-release software you should be careful about using the product on your main machine.
If you want to give Microsoft feedbacks, do it through Visual Studio 2010 / .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 Forums.
Back to English ...
Hello Everyone! Welcome to the new kid in the Microsoft Israel Community.
It is kind of scary to open a new blog nowadays, as there are only 1.4M new blog posts every day (June 2008), but I believe it is time to share my knowledge and thoughts with you.
So what is this blog going to be about? That presumably will develop as I do, but my initial idea (and dare I say niche) is to focus on UI development and WPF, with occasional technology stuff thrown in.
I’ll use this blog to share news stories I find interesting, show some source code from interesting projects, share some tips and tricks, carry weighty discussions on relevant issues, and maybe more.
My great challenge will be to make this blog a touch more interesting than just a knowledge base.
So Bookmark this blog, email to a friend/colleague or add its RSS feed, and let’s hit the road for our long trip. And of course, this blog is intended for you, so if at any point you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know so that I can make improvements.
Until next time …
J.