Walt and Josh blogged about it. It would be wrong of me not to.

Dinner with the disciples last night was great…

…a bit uncomfortable since most people were visibly awestruck by the doctor’s presence at our table.

I think its important to say that I feel like the doctor isn’t a bad guy. It just appears like he is the prototypical evil eccentric mastermind when we breaks into a loud “mooo hooo hooo ah a ahhhhh” (I did however hear that he is wanted in peru for kicking a llama and he conceived his first child at the age of six on a subway in a cloning experiment gone awry but I digress).

It was actually a night to remember. A life changing night. I will always remember the doctor’s powerful voice as he explained to us the importance of “oslo” and “m” and modeling saying, “From now on you will always measure life’s achievements as life before this asparagus and life after this asparagus.” It was truly life changing asparagus.

It was when the doctor told me I should be getting my Crack online and that “it was good quality stuff” that I realized that he really did care. His cold maniacal exterior was really just a visual style applied to his lookless control. Really he is a man of many dependency properties. His commands might have too many parameters but he is a great resource dictionary to hang out with at your next routed event.

Dr. WPF I look forward to having dinner with you at PDC 09

Other than Karim’s office show and tell every now and then I never got a chance to really look at this until now. http://dragonshed.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/attachedbindings-for-silverlight/

In honor of the PDC I wont be using non MS products… Other than my iphone… But where possible I will be using things like Windows Live Photo Gallery beta instead of using my default Aperture in OS X or when I need to look something up I will use maps.live.com

I mentioned yesterday that I am using Windows Live Skydrive and Mesh extensively lately. I will be reviewing some of my experiences this week with other great Windows user experiences/services.

First review is for Windows Live Photo Gallery beta… Honestly I am impressed… I didnt expect to be. But I give it high marks in speed and usability. Still low marks in emotional connection but that is a challenge because I havent quite bought into the baby blues of the current generation of Windows Live branding.

I snapped a few pics from my hotel and created a PDC set on flickr all through the app http://www.flickr.com/photos/photon8/sets/72157608391962882/ Very simple process and using things like Windows Live Writer and Photo Gallery its starting to become a consistent experience about how I share… The consistency is creating a social app experience that is integrated with my local client experience that I am really starting to like. Its better than blurring the lines…. Its hiding them all together.

Next up… instead of using iChat or Windows Live Messenger or Skype to video conference with my wife and kids… I am going to try out Windows Live Video Messages

http://videomessages.live.com/portal/welcome.aspx

Nathan E Dunlap

nathan@designerslove.net

http://www.designerslove.net

Hmmm…. Oomph!

Just wrapped up a project and am feeling really good right now… Exciting times for WPF and Windows in general! Really pumped about going to the PDC… Finally getting a chance to look over the sessions list.

I finally got a chance to play with the Pixel Shaders Library on CodePlex and now I am really jazzed about what you can do with effects.

I actually tried this in the project that I worked on this week and it was sweet… I applied the ColorTone effect to desaturate my images and put a specific color cast on the image…

It looks like this… (sorry no time to get formatted code in this post… Screenshots are all you get today)

Then I turned it into a button and animated the ColorToneEffect properties when you mouse over the button. Code is posted to my Skydrive. (Loving Skydrive by the way… and Mesh too… Mesh rocks!)

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/10/18/from-idea-to-feature-a-view-from-design.aspx

Jumping on the redundant blogging bandwagon. Congratulations to the team. Its an exciting day.

Im downloading and installing right now:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c22d6a7b-546f-4407-8ef6-d60c8ee221ed&DisplayLang=en

Ok im excited to get my website updated to be a cool Silverlight front end to WordPress… I recently wanted to create a twitter plugin using my own text similar to what Robby did with Ingebretsen Neato…

Here is the tool from Philip Lanier to do just that:

MyOwnFont

If you dont have a Tablet PC and arent willing to reghack to make your machine thinks its a Tablet PC then you can use these web services which work really well to:

http://www.fontifier.com/

http://www.yourfonts.com/

Blend allows you to actually design data much more easily than any tool I have used in the past. A long with the massive control you have in the platforms over presentation… You can actually see the data render at design time and changes you make to DataTemplates are reflected immediately across all the data. Its a beautiful thing.

It is really hard for me to convince people that I am actually more productive and creative when I have live data to work with but its true.

Many times I just cant get my hands on live data and I end up hacking together fake data for my prototypes. I just found this tool and so far it is crazy useful:

http://www.generatedata.com

Between this and the lorum ipsum generator… http://www.lipsum.com/ It is alot faster to get my data driven designs off the ground.

SAMS publishing hit a home run with Adam Nathan’s WPF Unleashed. So a lot of us have been really excited to get our paws on Laurent’s new book on Silverlight.

Today Laurent twittered that his book was available online… http://safari.peachpit.com/9780768686845

My copy is downloaded to my phone and I know what I will be reading tonight.