Gert Van Gool’s bachelor thesis

After a second hiatus, which took way longer then anticipated. I’m back working on my thesis.

Today trying to get my paper structure completed and correct the current text.

MIX07 is currently being held in Las Vegas. And the major thing that is/was shown there is Silverlight. I said a couple of weeks a go that WPF/e wasn’t really interesting because it only supported Javascript. Well, they changed it. The new version, Silverlight 1.1 (note: what’s the point of creating a new version when the first one isn’t finished), contains a crossplatform CLR. In the keynote the showcased this by showing most demo’s on both IE and Safari. I couldn’t watch the whole keynote, but from what I saw it’s really awesome!

I (finally) uploaded my idea of my paper layout. It took quite a bit longer than it should have. Knowing that I only needed to compile the files and upload them. Anyway, I have my laptop back, still need to reinstall it though.

Another thing, I promised I would take a look into that book of “Designing interfaces” (O’Reily). When I googled it last weekend, I found the official website of that book which contains all the patterns.

WPF/e is gone. Today, well more like yesterday night, Microsoft renamed WPF/e (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere) to Silverlight (see all related press releases)

No words yet on a release date, but it should be in the first half of the year.

Tim Sneath has an interesting post about it (here)

I’ve been looking to how I was going to design the database (with web front-end).

For starters, I believe it would be most interesting if you could add more (different) languages. That would be mean that for an existing “problem” you could add a solution in XAML, UIML or any other XML based UI design language

The easiest (most logical/best?) way to store these interfaces would be in a database (MySQL). How do you query an XML file in a database? I know Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 supports this (go to ‘What’s new in SQL Server 2005‘ and look for XML Support), but I know of no others. Than I was thinking: what if you “parse” the file after it was uploaded? That way you can suggest tags to add this file, let the user decide which are relevant and add others. That would imply that you only have to search through these tags, you could even give more control by adding machine tags

I think that by this I just made my first milestone (personal milestone that is). All preparations are done now. I got a meeting with my promoters, so I’m looking for their approval of the idea of the webapp. And than I’ll start building the web application. When that’s finished, I can add XAML interfaces.

It has been another week. Health is better. So back on track (or an attempt)

I’ve been doing some reading and watching this week. I had some WPF(/e) articles that I still had to read, so that’s been keeping me occupied… I’ve also been watching some screencasts about WPF(/e), mostly where just demos with “simple” applications to learn the basics.

In the end I believe WPF/e is not as interesting as I believed. It’s more focused on browsers and “real” web applications, more or less like what Flash is doing. I’m however still looking for what will actually be used on Pocket PC/Smart phones. In the end we’ll have to wait for .NET CF 3.5 (which will be released together with Visual Studio “Ocras”) to see. In the January CTP of VS Orcas was a release include of .NET CF 3.5 (article). However, I’ve yet to see detailed info about WPF and .NET CF.

Sidenote: revolUXions is a nice videoblog/screencast about WPF and the designer tools (for non-programmers). On my del.icio.us I’ve been collecting some nice examples of WPF applications, I do believe I lost some since I remember I’ve seen way more…

This was my last update for the coming weeks, I have an exam on the 23th of March. That I have to pass since it is my last chance (well, not exactly but I do feel that way)

I hope that my promoters are reading my blog. And they understand my choice to first focus on my maths exam…

See you all March 24 for a fresh start!

I had a fun 2 weeks… My asthma got the best of me. Well together with some sort of virus. It was exhausting, but I could at least finish my normal course work.

But than last week, that irritating virus got stronger. I got weaker and it became clear I had the flu Not bad, first time that I’m sick in 3 years. So I had it coming. However due to my asthma the doc said that I had a high chance for pneumonia. Joy

Anyway… we’re 5 days later, I’m still coughing very badly. Tonight I’m going to the doc again, seeing whether he can do something about it and whether the coughs are still only asthmatic or getting worse.

Conclusion: I haven’t done any work on my thesis… I’m still lagging on “normal” course work…

According to this webpage a XAML compiler exists for Mono… However the original project page seems to be empty. I can’t even get the anonymous SVN access to work.

On Koders, the source code of compiler was still available (xamlc.cs). A weird thing I noticed, the demo code uses a class called ConsoleApp. Which uses apparently some self written XAML components Maybe it’s time for me to really learn XAML.

Note: in the current revision of the SVN repository there is nothing to be found of xamlc.

Update: I did some more reading into the Mono project. I can’t seem to find any reason why xamlc is no longer in the main repository. According to this article, they are still working on a compiler…

The next release of Mono is Mono 2.0 (not to be confused with .NET 2.0) and is planned for release in Q3 of 2007. It is expected to have full .NET 2.0 API support; code access security (CAS) should be complete; it should include both VB.NET version 8 (including generics) and GCC compilers, compacting garbage collection, and integration with Visual Studio and Apple X-Code IDEs. It will also include a subset of the Microsoft “Indigo” and InfoCard technologies, which have been started as a Mono subproject code-named “Olive.” Olive is a massive undertaking that will be building on the System.Workflow, System.Query, System.Xml.Xling, and System.Windows.Serialization (including xaml and xamlc support). Mono currently has a need for developers to get involved with Olive, especially those interested in writing test code.

Update2: You can find xamlc in the repository of codename olive: http://mono.myrealbox.com/source/trunk/olive/tools/xamlc/

I finally installed the blog So that’s it for the moment…

Now the only thing left to do is start to blog and start working on everything.