Whither the WPF Posts?

A commenter pointed out (not politely, but accurately) that I have not posted any new content about WPF in some time, which reminded me that I never actually wrote about the job transition that I made over two years ago. I apologize for that, in particular to those who had been subscribed to this blog hoping to see new WPF tidbits.

In late 2006 (after .Net Framework 3.0 shipped), I transitioned over to the Exchange Server team, where I’ve been immersed in the humble task of making email more reliable, accessible, and easier to manage for hundreds of millions of users. In the process, I’ve learned a good deal about building large-scale server applications and how to ship software as a service.

But unfortunately for this blog, up until very recently, the details of my work had been confidential. Now that we’ve shipped Beta 1 of Exchange Server 2010 (to much cheering, woohoo!), I’m at liberty to share. However, I expect that if I decide to use blogging as the medium to do so, I’ll start a separate blog for that purpose. This blog started out as a personal blog, made some forays into the work space, and has come full circle back to the personal realm. To avoid any further confusion, I think it’ll stay there. If you’re interested in hearing about my various experiments with cooking, photography, various arts and crafts projects, international travel, happenings around the Seattle area, and my occasional ramblings about local and national political issues, then stay tuned. If you were here for the WPF content, I promise that I won’t be offended if you unsubscribe (assuming you haven’t already).

Of course, many in the WPF community have found the old WPF posts helpful (and from some of the comments that still crop up, I know that many still do), so I absolutely plan to keep them here for posterity. But I don’t expect that I’ll begin posting about WPF again anytime soon (here or elsewhere), as I just haven’t been spending time with that technology. To those of you who are using it – best of luck, and please leverage the current WPF team and the vibrant WPF/Silverlight community! Although I’ve moved on, I still look back on my WPF days fondly and I’m always excited to hear about interesting applications of the technology.

Happy 0th Birthday, Windows Vista!

Mail from Kenny’s cousin David this morning:

From: Pashman, David
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 5:58 AM
To: Kenny Wolf; Lauren Lavoie
Subject: congratulations

Are congratulations in order for the birth of your new baby OS?

Yes, I suppose you could say that Kenny and I (and the thousands of other folks who shipped Windows Vista) released our own little baby into the world today. I think she has a bright future ahead of her. :)

WPF/E First CTP

This morning, the WPF/E team shipped their first CTP! You can now download the plugin for Windows and Mac. Check out the WPF/E MSDN Developer Center to get started and Channel 9 WPF/E Playground for samples. The following blogs have more info:

Congrats to the WPF/E team and enjoy!

SW vs. HW Performance for Layered Windows

Seema has a good post explaining why software rendering is sometimes faster than hardware rendering for layered windows. In short, your software vs. hardware performance will depend on your specific video card. Seema suggests:

Key takeaway: a semi-transparent window is a particularly complex feature for WPF’s rendering system. Figure out early what type of hardware that you expect your app to run on, the performance that is acceptable for your users, and whether you want to use Window transparency.