Wpf Wonderland

A common dilemma while attending big conferences is choosing which sessions to attend.  Look around you at break time and you’ll see scores of attendees analyzing the conference schedule and making pencil marks next to the talks they find interesting.  Once they’ve settled on a plan they scurry off to the session, grabbing a few cookies for the trip, hoping there is still seats available in their desired room.

The problem comes when there are two or more interesting talks that are scheduled at the same time.  If so, you have to choose which one is most important, a decision that can be painful at times.  Of course now that Microsoft releases videos for all of the talks it is less of an issue, you can always watch the other sessions later.

PDC09 is packed with content, as usual.  If you are looking for UI/Design related talks I’ve culled through the giant catalog and narrowed the list down to the following talks.  I’ve left out the ASP.NET UI talks from this list, as I tend to focus on Silverlight and WPF topics on this blog.

As I see the landscape when looking at the topics planned for the week.  I see these areas of interest for the UI aficionado.

• WPF
• Silverlight
• Expression
• Windows 7
• Surface
• DirectX

Since this is the WPF Wonderland blog I’ll start with WPF.

WPF

Mastering WPF Graphics and Beyond

Learn how to take advantage of the latest graphics features in WPF to build polished, responsive applications. See examples of how to boost the visual sharpness of your applications, how to take full advantage of new layout rounding capabilities, how to make everything from transitions to huge element trees snappy and responsive, and how to integrate organic animations into your applications. Learn to push the bar for desktop application experiences up a notch – all with the latest that WPF 4 has to offer!

XAML Futures in Microsoft .NET Framework, Microsoft Silverlight and Tools

Dive into advances in XAML happening in future versions of .NET, Silverlight, Microsoft Visual Studio, and Microsoft Expresssion Blend. Hear about XAML parsers, markup compilers, analysis, transformations, localization, and tools. Dig even deeper into performance optimizations possible in .NET, and explore possibilities with a XAML DOM and DLR based scripting.

Windows Presentation Foundation 4 Plumbing and Internals

Come get the inside scoop on how Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) powers all its rich services – like layout, databinding, and animation. There is a lot of heavy lifting done for you under the hood; in this session, we crack open these system components, including the trees (visual, logical, and inheritance), the property system and its change notification, and a few of the routing systems that all messages go through. Bring your hard-hat for this one!

How Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Was Built with Windows Presentation Foundation 4

Get an insider’s look at how Microsoft created the next-generation, large-scale integrated development environment experience using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) 4. Learn best practices and hear real-world experiences in developing mixed Win32-WPF applications that combine WPF content with Win32 HWNDs. Discover how Visual Studio 2010 uses the new WPF text-rendering stack that utilizes DWrite.

Advanced Windows Presentation Foundation Application Performance Tuning and Analysis

Come walk through the top performance and coding pitfalls in large-scale, complex Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications. Learn to use the performance analysis tools and methodologies to find problems in real application scenarios, and discuss solutions to optimize your WPF application for maximum performance. Understand how to tackle a non-performing app and transform it into a quality application that runs as well as it looks.

Microsoft Surface: Multi-touch Development Integration with Windows 7 and WPF 4

Hear how Windows 7 adds support in native code for accelerating media transcoding and specific playback experiences through the new asynchronous Media Foundation transform (MFT) model. Learn how to write and use accelerated MFTs, and how to license for preference in Windows Media Player and portable device operations with Windows Shell. See a managed sample using the transcoding API, and how the new Device Proxy simplifies AVStream driver based video capture in Media Foundation. Also learn about in-box support for high-definition UVC webcams and the new extensibility model, along with how the new native Source Reader object allows easy capture integration into existing applications. Finally, explore new tools for developing and debugging in Media Foundation.

See you at PDC.