Incremental Blogger

I have a better understanding of some of the issues I’ve been experiencing with WPF on Vista. First, it appears that the display beta drivers definitely have an influence on the repaint problem I was seeing. In fact, I’ve since discovered that most of the time I don’t see it occur and it seems OK on other Vista machines.

In terms of the menus, here’s what I’m seeing. On Vista, submenu items appear to be inheriting the parent menu item’s Foreground color. In XP, on the other hand, the Foreground color does not get inheritied. I think it’s correct on XP. Compare this to the Background color which doesn’t get inherited in either XP nor Vista.

You can create a menu with submenu items in Microsoft Expression Blend and change the parent menu item’s Foreground color to see the submenu items change in real-time. Notice, again, that changing the parent’s Background color has no affect on the background colors of the child menu items.

I wrote a simple XAML app that shows what I’m seeing in Vista (with and without Glass):

and now in XP:

In the dropdown menu the menu items should not be red (I think), but they are in Vista.

I may have something goofy in my Vista installations, so here’s the test project I created and a sample app called MenuTest. If you want to give it a try on your Vista RTM machine, let me know what you see.

Here’s the XAML I’m using for the menu:

<Menu>
<MenuItem Header=”File” Foreground=”Red” Background=”Pink”>
<MenuItem Header=”Item 1″></MenuItem>
<MenuItem Header=”Item 2″></MenuItem>
<MenuItem Header=”Item 3″></MenuItem>
<MenuItem Header=”Item 4″></MenuItem>
</MenuItem>
</Menu>

This ExtremeTech article has the best breakdown of what’s in Vista that I’ve seen so far. (Make sure to check out the chart on page 2 of the article.)

It’s 8AM PST and I’m watching Steve Ballmer’s webcast for the business launch of Vista and Office 2007.

Evidently the launch webcast is being broadcast in New York. It’s funny. When there’s clapping it sounds like there are three people in the audience. During one pan of the audience it looks more like 100 or so. Mostly international press.

If you want to attend a local Vista/Office launch event click here. At the lower-right side of the page is a section called “Come to a local launch event.” Click on “Sign up now.”

There are two sets of events: “Read for a New Day” and “Microsoft Across America.”

The two events have different agendas and intended audiences. Here’s the agenda for the Microsoft Across America events and the agenda for Read for a New Day.

The Ready for a New Day Events appear to have a more extensive agenda. I noticed though that when you go through the two-drop-list “questionnaire” that helps you pick an appropriate event, the Ready for a New Day Events won’t show up in your region unless you indicate that you have more than 50 computers (at least if you say you’re a developer). I guess if you have fewer computers than this that you fall into the small business category and Microsoft would like you to attend a Microsoft Across America Event. There’s probably only limited seating at the Ready for a New Day Events so it makes sense that Microsoft would like to reserve this space for its larger customers. The downside with this approach is that it doesn’t take into account the more vocal bloggers out there who might belong to a small business but have a rather large audience. I didn’t try, but maybe some other job types will always lead to a Ready for a New Day Event. I tried a few and seemed to always get the same result. I guess you can always indicate that you influence more than 50 computers if you belong to a small business and are a developer and really want to go to a Ready for a New Day Event. In my region (Phoenix), this is the only choice for an event anyway. Otherwise I have to travel to California, Nevada, Colorado, or New Mexico to get to a Microsoft Across America Event. Anyway, I suggest trying a few options in the questionnaire drop list to see if you’re missing anything.

I started breaking down a list of the events listed on the website, but decided that I might be missing something. I don’t see any overall list. Maybe I’ll put one together later today.

CNet has a good article that provides an overview of Vista, its features, and what equipment you’ll need to run it.

The good news for the Tablet ecosystem is that Tablet bits are included in all the permutations of Vista except the lowest two: a version for emerging markets and Basic Home. Home Premium, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, and Vista Ultimate all include Tablet bits. So now, even if you don’t have a Tablet you can bring up the TIP, for instance, and try it out with the mouse or touchpad. Sure it’s hard to handwrite this way, but it can be done. If you have a Tablet though or an external digitizer (such as a Wacom Graphire), the Tablet features are automatically enabled.

Now let’s say you installed Vista Ultimate on an iMac using Bootcamp and you don’t have an external digitizing pad. How can you test out the Tablet features? Easy. Press the Vista “start” button and then in the “run” edit field at the bottom of the menu that appears, enter “TabTip.exe” and press Enter. That’ll launch the Tablet Input Panel (TIP).

In the TIP you can try out the handwriting recognition by scribbling words using your mouse. As you write your words in the TIP, you’ll see the recognized words appear below your handwriting. If a word isn’t recognized correctly, you can click on the recognized word and correct it using a correction window that appears. Alternatively, you can scratch out the incorrectly recognized handwriting and write the word again. Sometimes you can even write over part of a word if it has simply mis-recognized a single letter.

Yes, Basic Home owners won’t have access to the Tablet features. My guess is as good as yours as to how large the market will be of Basic Home owners, but if previous permutations of Windows are any indication, this segment of the market will probably be huge. Your Aunt Sally and Grandpa Joe will probably be using Basic Home, for instance. They’ll go down to the local super store and buy whatever is on the shelf–not knowing what they might be missing.

If you have an awesome Tablet app you want to share with Home Basic users, there is hope. They’ll be able to upgrade as Ed Bott shows here. CNet doesn’t indicate what the upgrade costs will be in their article. Nonetheless, the idea of easily upgrading my Aunt Sally to a Tablet or Media Center capable version of Home Premium sounds like a winner to me.

I finally got around this weekend to installing the RTM version of Vista on my Toshiba M400 Tablet PC. I’m typing this post on Vista right now. Everything looks nice and responds quite nicely. I’m going to try to make the switch this week to developing full-time under Vista.

The installation though was a bit rougher than I had expected (you have to have a Raid driver to proceed with the Vista installation). And not everything is working yet either (rotation, hotkey, common modules won’t install). The issue? Drivers.

In a nutshell, Vista may be RTM’ed, but in terms of drivers, we’re still in beta land.

Like others have pointed out the first step is to start by downloading the various drivers from Toshiba: http://www.csdsupport.toshiba.com/tais/csd/support/windows_vista/vista_beta.cgi?lsAction=list_files&model_id=10. You’ll notice that many of the drivers are listed as beta versions for Vista RC1 or RC2. For the sake of the mass market, I sure hope Toshiba gets the “real” drivers up on their site sooner rather than later. Why? What’s the big deal, you ask. After all the consumer version of Vista isn’t supposed to be out until the end of January 2007, which is about two months away. The word is that this should be plenty of time for Toshiba and other OEMs to get their Vista drivers in order.

Here’s the problem though: The early adopters posting about their experiences with Vista on the Internet are creating too much Vista link magic right now. So for the mass market, when they start installing Vista they are going to run into posts like this one. Maybe after six months or so more timely Vista install and driver information will bubble to the top of Google. I hope so.

Until then, my question is: How will this influence the Vista upgrade market? Probably not much, unless users run into questions with the M400, for instance, where you have to download, unzip, and copy to a flash drive (most likely I imagine) a Raid driver for their harddrive in order to get the Vista install underway. That’s when they’ll starting Googling. Actually, I hope they don’t and instead post on forums asking for help to build a new set of more timely information and links. By the time Vista appears on store shelves I hope the installation sequence for Vista is a lot more straightforward and well explained on the Net.

Vista is now available for download on MSDN! Downloading now. There goes my Christmas shopping tonight. Vista install party instead.

I’m experiencing download speed of around 100KB, which yields a total download time of about 7 hours. (2554.5 MB.)

Microsoft MSDN developer site is now indicating that “Windwos Vista is expected to be available (for download) on Friday November 17, 2006 PST“.

I guess that means I don’t have to keep checking MSDN every 15 minutes today looking for the Vista RTM

Robert McLaws is Photoshopping what a Zune SideShow device might be like.

Jim Allchin blogs about Windows and Microsoft Update for Vista: “…with Windows Vista, we are using Automatic Updates to help you get drivers that may be missing from your system.”

What do you do when the media and some bloggers misinterpret something you’ve said and the word spreads around something you didn’t mean? You blog a response. That’s what Jim Allchin has done quiet effectively with a recent media/blogger spat over what level of anti-virus protection Windows Vista users should expect to have.

This is an example of how companies can use blog. Get in the conversation. People do listen.

Interesting discussion about developing under Vista using Visual Studio 2003. Turns out that this will be an “unsupported scenario.”

Scott Guthrie (Microsof’t’s General Program Manager from the Developer Division) clarifies the situation here.

This doesn’t have a huge impact on me, but I guess it’s another reason to keep some XP machines around. (Yeah, I know I could use VPC.)

Maybe I’m missing something, but shouldn’t Windows Communication Framework (WCF) have an XML declarative syntax for specifying such things as service or message contracts, the type of connection to make in an app (if any), and so on? Or am I getting too smitten with XAML again?

I’ve been wanting to code up a radial menu control in WPF for a long while. I’ve started a couple times, but gave up after I realized I was trying to make the code too flexible and my understanding of how WPF worked didn’t match.

Today, however, I tried a much simpler approach. I gave myself permission to hardcode anything I wanted. It made a big difference. In about an hour I had the ultra-tiny “form” app shown here with a semi-transparent radial menu:

Now that I’ve had some limited success, I’ll try for something a little more re-usable and something worthwhile sharing.

This time around, though, I constructed the radial menu from an Ellipse that was positioned at the bottom left of the window. Actually, it’s top position is bound to the height of a grid that consumes the whole client area of the window itself. And further, the location of the ellipse is translated vertically by half its height to place it in the correct position. The left position is fixed since the left edge of the window doesn’t ever resize. Just the right and bottom edges do.

The toolbar buttons are merely images that are strategically placed within the edge of the ellipse. Nothing fancy here. Triggers (and styling) are used to provide feedback when the cursor enters one of the buttons or clicks on them. Right now the icons don’t save any state. This is a toy app after all.

Anyway, there lots more to do, but it was fun seeing at least this much running.

Vista RC1 is available to anyone that’s part of the beta program.

Neowin has the links you need here as well as a link to joining the beta program itself.

I’m downloading it now.

Nick White from the Windows Vista Team Blog posts that Vista RC1 is done.

Cool. I was thinking about installing the 5336 Vista build, but now that the availability of Vista RC1 is imminent, I’m going to install it instead.

I have big hopes for RC1. For the most part everything I’ve heard about its predecessor is quite positive, so my fingers are crossed for RC1. I’m ready to switch to Vista 100%. I hope RC1 is close enough to make this feasible.

Nick suggests in his post that RC1 will be widely available to testers sometime starting or after next week.