Ever since Microsoft released its first CTP of WPF/e in December I was wondering what the strange naming convention does it use for binaries and the code — aghost, agcore.dll, agctrl.dll, agcodec.dll and npag.dll. Now, when we know that WPF/e’s official name is Silverlight, it started to make sense.

It would be interesting to know what is the rationale behind using codename WPF/e for several months before announcing Silverlight in April.

People has often been confusing WPF/e with WPF and this might be the point. Use the temporary name to bridge existing and powerful technology (ie WPF) to the new one (Silverlight), which otherwise could be easily left unnoticed.

Every time I read it — it inspires me. Every single post hits it right to the point. If I would be forced to unsubscribe from all feeds but one, I’d stay with this one without doubts.

Meet Seth Godin — my favorite blog author of all times. I’m not sure how he makes it, but I wish I’m doing like that in blogging (and marketing) some day.

For now the best I can do is to recommend you to go to his site and subscribe to the rss-feed — you won’t regret — I promise.

How to make $5,000 in one day without making anything? Ask Tom Barba, he seems to figure it out.

Today I received the following email from him:

Hello,

We acquired the domain MetaLink.com recently. It is now available at the price of USD 6500.

If you are interested in it, pls let us know before 3:00 pm, Tuesday, Apr 17, 2007 EST. After that, this domain may not be available anymore.

About the transition:
The transition of domain and payment can be finished through a trusted third-party escrow service like sedo.com, afternic.com, etc, so you don’t have to worry about the trust problems. If you don’t get the domain, we will not get paid.

NOTE: If the name is bought by other company or person, it may never be available again.

Best regards,

Tom Barba

What’s wrong with it? Isn’t it a fair business offer? It would be if not one small detail. Tom lies and they didn’t acquire the domain. It’s still for sale at snapnames.com and the price is $1,250.

Click on the screenshot to open demo page.

Microsoft has no plans for supporting 3D in Silverlight (formerly WPF/e) but since they give us a decent 2D vector renderer it’s quite easy to implement simple 3D graphics using JavaScript and standard WPF/e shapes. As an example I added third dimension to my 2D animation benchmark.

The hard part was to make objects display in the right z-order. WPF/e doesn’t have zIndex support at this time (update: it was added in Silverlight 1.1 alpha) so to manipulate display order you have to change object position in the objects tree. I figured out that to make it work smoothly I have to sort all scene objects by depth first and then render them from front to back (check out the source code to see how it’s implemented).

The result looks good in my opinion although it’s notably slow in Firefox (too much alpha-blending I guess).

(May 30, 2007: I updated this post with the new name of WPF/e)

Indirectly but efficiently.

I read this post of Ryan Stewart today, which inducted a little reflection on my own experience dealing with Flex. It started with WPF/e CTP release in December. We have been for a long time building on Microsoft’s technologies so I try to keep up with what’s new and couldn’t miss that. I got WPF/e, played with it and liked what I seen. Then I decided to find out how it compares with other RIA technologies around, which eventually lead me to trying Flex.

It didn’t take long then to include Flex into our development cycle — all thanks to WPF/e.

This doesn’t mean we won’t be using WPF/e — we will probably do, however we are already using Flex now and WPF/e still has a long way to go. It might be that our experience is unique, however I feel it’s not. Microsoft might just wake up the need for RIA adoption among its huge developers base and Adobe is here with Flex to grab them, while WPF/e is being polished (although some people are already demanding to distribute WPF/e with Windows Update ASAP).

Obviously, WPF/e has its own unique advantages (no compilation needed is the first and a big one), which makes it a good replacement for the tasks, where Flash is typically used now — games, video, ads, charts etc. I think that, if things go well, WPF/e is going to penetrate that niche, although many people will find it easier and more efficient to switch to Flex as browser (and related hassle) -free RIA platform.

Today I used “cool” as del.icio.us tag for the first time.

I never thought I would use it at all but when I saw this personal website of Bret Victor it came up organically and indisputable. Other del.icio.us users seems to agree. If you haven’t seen it yet — sit down and take a look.

I got to the site to check who is the author of Magic Ink — an amazing paper on UI-design, focused on reducing interactivity rather than building on it. I haven’t read it yet (I don’t think anyone did as seen from this discussion at Digg, where I found the link) but even brief scanning proves that the concepts Bret presents deserve very careful attention. I downloaded the PDF and will be reading it slowly as time permits.