We are happy to announce (or repeat) that Enterprise Library 4.1 and Unity 1.2 from Microsoft PnP group is out. Why are we so happy, well nVentive collaborated with Microsoft on this project.

This service release is a minor one, but brings one major new functionality : Interception from Unity. If you are using Unity as your IOC, i strongly urge you to upgrade to this new version and find that:

1. The container can resolve itself :)
2. AOP programming is one step closer. You can reuse the matching rules and call handlers from PIAB, or invent your own.

We'll be blogging about this new release very soon, with code examples to get you going.

As always, you can find these on CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com/unity or http://www.codeplex.com/entlib) or the msdn landing pages (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa138002.aspx).

As announced previously, nVentive will be presenting at the Montreal Tech Days, brought to you by Microsoft on November 6th and 7th. Make sure the register, as this event is not a free one.

Erik will be giving the "Blackbelt Data Binding in WPF" presentation (make sure your to bring your karate skills) and François will be giving the "Building Differentiated UI Applications Using Composite WPF" talk. As a sneak preview, you can also catch François for the Tech Days in Toronto, as he will be doing his presentation there also.

These presentations should help your business intergrate the latest and greatest technologies from Microsoft for presenting information to your users. While François` talk will concentrate with some of the "best practices" given by Microsoft`s Patterns and Practices group on how to build composite applications, Erik`s will dig deeper into the misteries of data binding.

We hope to see you there, and as always, will be available to answer any questions that you might have on these new technologies.

nVentive is happy to annouce that it will be moving to new offices starting November 1st. This move will allow us to better serve our clients by offering space to offer training on our own premise, develop our own software and promote our new Center of Excellence. Stay tuned for more information.

When we were in Quebec city last week training a group of people on WPF, one of the trainees asked a question :

   How would I go and change the "presentation" of the scroll bar.

This questioned was asked during one of the labs and so we had time (10 minutes) to come up with a quick answer, here is the walkthrough that we presented:

1. Subclass the ScrollBar control by deriving a new class from it, don't forget to add this code in the static constructor so that styles gets hooked up correctly :
   

      18             DefaultStyleKeyProperty.OverrideMetadata(typeof(MyScrollBar),

      19                 new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(typeof(MyScrollBar)));

2. Load up Reflector and locate the the PresentationFramwork.Aero.dll assembly in the GAC. This assembly contains WPF resource dictionaries that WPF merges into the application scope when a WPF application starts. WPF loads the correct dll "theme" file according to the OS that is running.
3. Install the BamlViewer addin for Reflector because the DLL doesn't contain readable XAML. It is stored by the compiler in a binary format in order to optimize loading and storage of these massive XML files.
4. Locate the section in the converted XAML that pertains to the ScrollBar control, copy that into your own resource section, rename a few things to "MyScrollBar" and voilà, a custom scrollbar.

This is the 1000 feet view on how to do skinning, and will require a lot more work when creating a custom style that works correctly (handling commands, events, triggers...).

It was a mere introduction to demonstrate the simplicity of the model that WPF uses to "present" controls.

Last week, Erik gave a 2 day training in Quebec city on the topic of WPF. He was amazed to see just how much interest there currently is for this new technology, especially now that SilverLight 2 got released.

These are some of the questions that were asked, as well as pointers to the answers:

1 - What do you recommend, a XBAP application or a SiliverLight one ?

   This is a hard one because it involves so many upfront decisions. If you do not control the computers that will run the application, a SiliverLight application is the easiest to deploy. At the same time, SilverLight applications have severe constraints (partial trust, doesn't benefit from the full .net framework, stripped down WPF, limited network access...) but benefits from advances like DeepZoom (checkout the DeepEarth project). XBAP applications are normal .net applications that are hosted in the browser (Internet Explorer) and are usually partial trust (as the assemblies are downloaded at run-time from a webserver).

2 - Should we write new controls ?

   WPF comes with so many extension points (skins, themes, control templates, data templates...) that should all be evaluated before actually writing a new control. In a upcoming post, we will explain the "on the fly walkthough" we used to change how scroll bars were displayed for a "trendy application". Writing new controls is still a possibility, allthough we think you will find that there are better ways to extend WPF.

3 - Isn't SilverLight just for making cheesy animations on the web ?

   SilverLight 1.0 was only able to work with WPF (through XAML) and was mostly used to display media. SilverLight 2.0 comes with an implementation of the .net framework which allows you to develop a lot of the same kinds of applications you do with the .net framework; think of it in the same way as you would the Compact Framework. One major difference with the Compact Framework (the one that runs on a Windows Mobile phone) is that there is no binary compatibility for assemblies and so code has to be physically recompiled. Microsoft believes so much in the SilverLight plateform for business applications that they are porting prism and unity to it (see here and here).

nVentive will be presenting it's "Top 10 Umbrellas" talk at the Ottawa.NET Community on Thursday, November 5th. Come and hear us talk about Umbrella and how the ideas within can save you development time.