Ashish has some very informative recent posts about resource loading in WPF.
This stuff is important to just about anyone writing a WPF application, and I don’t think it’s hit MSDN yet. It’s a pretty nice model — you can just use URIs for everything, and there are abstractions that enable you to be agnostic of hosting model (browser/standalone), packaging model (loose/embedded), and site of origin (the location from which the application was deployed).
Just 4 more business days until my big winter vacation! I’ll post a detailed itinerary this weekend, so you can follow us on our journey through Argentina and Chile.
So far, choosing a band to play at the reception has been the most difficult part of wedding planning (finding sites for the ceremony and reception was actually suprisingly painless, the rabbi was a no brainer, cake shopping was a blast, dress shopping was labor-intensive but not frustrating and we got some Camacho Cigars out of the deal, and through a bit of searching and asking for recommendations we found an awesome photographer and an equally awesome videographer).
It’s particularly difficult for a few reasons:
The repertoire factor is one of the hardest ones. Kenny and I attended a beautiful wedding last year. We had a lot of fun there, but we each noticed that the other would cringe with almost every song that the band started playing. When we got home, we started a “blacklist” (not for our own wedding, of course, but for some hypothetical wedding that either of us might have if we ever got married). Not surprisingly, the blacklist had a few wedding “favorites” on it:
Any many many many more. I don’t think the fact that we hate these songs makes us music snobs. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want a band to play covers of a few songs written after 1980 instead of these old recycled “songs that will get people of all ages up and dancing.” With one of the bands we were talking to, we even got to the point of creating a mix CD, and asking them to learn some of the songs on it (and as you might have guessed, we didn’t get too far in the discussions with them before they told us to take a hike — yes, they rejected us).
Since then, we’ve gotten a few more leads (the best ones so far have been recommended by our photographer and our videographer), and we might be closing in on one (we’re going to check them all out before we leave for South America). I sure hope that one of them works out — I’ll be very glad when this part of the process is over.
Kenny beat me to posting this, but it’s worth pointing out for those who don’t read both of our blogs…
A few years ago, my mom found and clipped a recipe for cranberry salsa. We made it for Thanksgiving that year, and it was really good, but we sort of forgot about it for a few years. This year, we went to the big Thanksgiving bash at our Cousin Sunny’s (as we often do), and we made a large batch of the salsa as an alternative to the standard cranberry relish that is also served. The salsa was a huge hit – we got compliments from everyone, and several people asked me for the recipe (one of whom has already made it for her friends now, who have in turn asked for it).
We made it extra spicy by adding a couple of extra serrano chiles. You can scale it up or down to fit your taste. The recipe is here and it is awesome.
I am really late to post this, but: the November CTP of WinFX is available on MSDN (and has been since late November :)). One exciting thing about this release is that it works with the RTM releases of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Express. So go get your Workflow, Communications, and Presentation fix if you haven’t already!