Posts by Jeff Prosise

Silverlight 3 is loaded with new graphical goodies, and one of the goodies I’m most excited about is pixel shaders. A pixel shader is an object that transforms pixels output from the rendering pipeline before they’re rendered to the display surface. Silverlight 3 Beta 1 comes with two pixel shaders: BlurEffect and DropShadowEffect. The following example…

One of the WPF features that I miss in Silverlight is VisualBrush. Among other things, VisualBrush makes it easy to generate simulated reflections. To create reflections in Silverlight, we typically declare a copy of all the XAML we want to reflect, use a ScaleTransform to flip the copy upside-down, and apply an Opacity or OpacityMask to complete…

Another of the exciting new features coming in Silverlight 3 is the WriteableBitmap class. Silverlight 2 had no API for creating bitmaps, but WriteableBitmap makes creating bitmaps on the fly easy as pie. In Beta 1, you can create bitmaps from scratch, but you can’t (yet) edit existing bitmaps–for example, bitmaps assigned to XAML images or…

One of the many, many new features coming in Silverlight 3 (and featured in Silverlight 3 Beta 1, which shipped this week) is the perspective transform. In the Silverlight MyComix viewer I built for Silverlight 1.0, I faked the 3D rotation of a comic book cover around the Y-axis by using a ScaleTransform to squeeze the cover…

I’m packing up my stuff to head for Atlanta tomorrow and speak at MSDN’s Southern Fried Roadshow. If you attend, you’ll get to see a demo that I just put the finishing touches on. It uses dynamic Deep Zoom (that is, Deep Zoom with image tiles that are generated on the fly rather than by Deep…

Winter’s almost over and I’m excited that the weather is improving. This time of year, I’m glad I live in the south because I’m ready for warmth. To satisfy my jet craving, I recently joined the Georgia Jets flying club. Georgia Jets boasts probably the best RC jet-flying facility in the country, specially built just…

Microsoft recently published the RC release of their ASP.NET MVC Framework, and I’ve updated my “Jeff’s Hangar” MVC sample accordingly. The RC contains some cool new features, especially with regard to tooling support, but mostly it adds polish to features that were already there. I’ve rewritten the sample to be as true to the spirit…

You can tell how long someone has been around computers by mentioning “FDISK” and seeing if you’re met with a blank stare. Not many people remember FDISK. But for those that do, that knowledge can still come in handy today. Two weeks ago, I was packing my bags to head for the airport when my…

I had dinner with John Robbins and Jeffrey Richter tonight, and after an hour or so of chit-chat, I asked Richter what time it was. He checked his watch and found that it had blanked out. Turns out he’s wearing a solar-powered watch, and it’s been so long since they’ve seen the sun in Seattle…

It’s old news by now, but I couldn’t let it go by without saying a few words about an old friend who’s no longer with us. PC Magazine began life as a print magazine in 1982. And what a magazine it was! In the early days of personal computing, which were like the wild west…

I’ve been working with Silverlight DataGrids so I can learn about their strengths and weaknesses. And I ran across a situation in which I needed to do some custom data binding to populate cells in a DataGrid template column. I suspect other people will encounter similar situations, so I wanted to document the problem—and the…