We've been on a Presentation spree lately with .NET Montreal User Group, Ottawa .NET User Group, TechDays and DevTeach coming soon.

And while presenting on WPF and Umbrella, we received great feedback that made us realize that there are always ways to improve our presentations.

Here`s a Top 10 countdown focused on the Development environment you`re presenting to the attendees

1. Use ZoomIt from SysInternals to zoom and draw on the display
2. Instead of typing lengthy code or copying from a notepad, use Visual Studio Code Snippets
3. When typing code, use Visual Studio Auto-Complete feature using Ctrl+. to either resolve types, implement interfaces, ... It saves huge amount of time
4. Use Ctrl+E, D to reformat your documents correctly.
5. Try not to highlight too much code as it isn`t as readable with the default team
6. Close any unneeded window in Visual Studio (Properties Window, Ouput) or in the OS (Gadget Window, Office Toolbar, ...)
7. Close any application that might generate unnecessary popups (i.e. Messenger, Outlook, ...)
8. Disable Windows Updates so you don`t end up with a laptop that reboots during your talk
9. Use Mobility Center Presentation Mode (WindowsKey + X) to make you`re environment as blend as possible (No family photo background, No screen saver, ...)
10. This is the freebie tip. Let us know about an additional tip and the best tip will be both displayed on our blog and grant you a free access to our Launch Party!

DevTeach is coming soon, in 3 weeks in fact, and we wanted to mention it because of WPF. As you know, nVentive is strongly pushing the WPF technology so that we can start businesses can start building LOB applications with it.

I hadn't realized it before, but the first day (extra fee) has a full session with Kevin McNeish, where he will spend the day with Expression Blend. As if that wasn't enough, there are over 6 other sessions during the conference that will speak of WPF (or Silverlight).

Once done, don't forget to come and talk to us about your experience. nVentive is growing and will be on site to discover hidden talents.

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.