Author: lauren

TechEd 2006 Kicks Off!

TechEd 2006 began tonight in Boston with a keynote featuring Bob Muglia and Chris Capossela. There was a lot of energy in the room, and a set of very cool videos spoofing the show “24” (which seemed to be filmed primarily inside of the Seattle Library!)

I’ll be working the Windows Presentation Foundation demo station and labs throughout the week, so please stop by and say hello. I’ll be giving a talk on Thursday morning at 9:45 discussing application model stuff, and how to build applications for both Windows and the Web.

Details for my talk are as follows:

DEV336 – (WinFX) Windows Presentation Foundation: Creating Windows and Web Applications with WPF
Learn how to use Windows Presentation Foundation application-level primitives for data management, system interaction, hosting, and UI to create great client applications. See how to create both standalone client applications and rich browser applications that can take advantage of these services. Gain knowledge that will help you make application-level decisions, such as when your application should be hosted in the browser or a standalone window, whether or not to write a navigation-based application, and how to manage application data and settings for various scenarios.

Timeslot: 6/15/2006 9:45 – 11:00

I hope to see you there!

Upcoming WPF Samples

Here’s a list of a few WPF samples that I want to write soon (in no particular order):

  1. Building a FileUpload control
  2. Removing/restyling the NavigationWindow UI
  3. Displaying HTML inside of your WPF application
  4. Using URL arguments to enable “deep linking” for XBAPs
  5. Using Popup as a dialog in XBAPs

I’m posting the list here so that I don’t forget. :) But also, if you have any feedback — e.g. you really want to see the NavigationWindow UI sample before the HTML sample or there’s some other application model-oriented sample that you want to see before any of these — please let me know.

I won’t get to these until after TechEd Boston (next week!), but if you are blocked on any WPF questions in the meantime, feel free to contact me (as usual).

A Tale of Seven Wedding Blessings

This past weekend, I started working on the program that Kenny and I are going to distribute to our guests at the wedding ceremony. The program will have short blurbs on the Jewish traditions that we are incorporating into the ceremony, and the full English and Hebrew text of the Sheva B’rachot, or “Seven Blessings”, that are the central part of the Jewish wedding liturgy.

When I started, however, I found that the text of the Sheva B’rachot was nowhere to be found on the internet, either in image form or (as I preferred) text form. Unwilling to give up, I finally decided I was going to have to type them up myself. I downloaded a free Hebrew font, got out my tattered printed copy of the blessings, and set to work. This was no easy task, because the English-Hebrew keyboard mappings are not at all intuitive. And because Hebrew has a lot of complexities with the placement of vowels and dots and things all over the place, I had to spend a lot of time playing just to figure out the magic incantations to type in order to form the letters and words that I needed. For example, alef, the first letter in the alphabet, was mapped to the close paren (shift-0). Who knew?!

But after much pecking away, I finally figured out all of the mappings I needed and within a couple of hours I had my perfect rendering of the Sheva B’rachot. In my attempt to save some poor unsuspecting engaged Jewish couple from the same pain, I’m posting the MS Word doc containing the Hebrew text here. Enjoy! You’ll need the SPTiberian font, which is free and available for both Mac and Windows.

As a side note, I realized today that I would have been much happier on Saturday if I’d done a quick MSN Search for “SPTiberian” and found this convenient key mapping chart. Oy.