Long time ago, I learned an amazing technique to remember sequenced list of items and then recall items in the correct order. It’s a simple technique and you can remember any number of items with no limits. You can start practice with five items and then gradually increase number of items. You will be amazed with results, when you will be able to recall fifty items in the correct order. Ready? Let’s get started.

Let say, you are going on a shopping and you need to remember following items.

Tissue, Milk, Fish, Donut, Coffee

One thing which you can do, which you usually do, is to remember by reading list over and over again. Sometimes, you remember it correctly but sometimes you forget an item. Also, by this way, remembering five items may be easy but how about remembering twenty or fifty items? Would you be able to recall them easily without any aid?

This technique of remembering sequenced list of items is called “Link Method”. You will link every item with each other which is exactly how brain works.

In Link method, you will create ridiculous association with between items. First item in list is tissue. Imagine a big roll of tissue equal to the size of a truck tire. Second item is milk and associate with first item by imagining that milk bottle is made of tissue. Off course, in real life you will never get a milk bottle made of tissue. But you need to have a ridiculous association between items. Third item is fish. Normally, on milk bottles we see a picture of cow. But here, you will imagine a picture of fish on milk bottle which is made of tissue. Donut will be associated by visualizing that a fish is eating donut. Last one is coffee and you will imagine that coffee is made up of thousands of tiny donuts.

Now, recall everything in your mind and bring all ridiculous pictures you have imagined. Go to shopping mall and you will be amazed how easily you were able to recall items. After exercising with five item, try same technique with ten and then with twenty items.

Successful CTO’s say that it is inappropriate to have a software engineers manage UI design process. Why? Well, the answer is simple, do you make UI designer (graduated from Art schools) responsible for software engineering? Of course not! We know UI designers can’t handle deep technical details and bits/bytes calculation of software development. It will be an utter failure. Still we allow software engineers to copy and snatch designs from here and there and put them together to look nice. Despite all of us know that 95% of software engineers have no artistic sense. It seems like software engineering is more important than UI design.

Let’s go back in history. In 1997, Apple stock level was down to its lowest levels and company was in big trouble. At that time, Apple’s new CEO Steve Jobs did two things, changed company focus to meet customer’s core requirements and started using industrial design in products. If you ask any financial experts about Apple, you will hear them saying that design saved Apple. Even today, when we think of Apple the first thing comes into mind is artistically designed products which look like pieces of sculpture. So, UI design can save company as it did for Apple.

Having software engineers participate in UI design could add serious risks to product. There are many factors which forces us take these risks. Number one factor of taking these risks is money. We all want to save money and try to maximize profit by reducing cost of development. Hiring a separate designer and other expenses are much higher as compared to turnkey solutions or stealing from web. Second is time, designers do need time to think and create something using their imagination. They cannot be rushed. I am sure there could be more factors but if we try to evaluate money and time factor versus risks which we add to project. You will find out money and time is far less than the risks of project failure. Imagine, having a design of gray color website for a school and an orange color web site for Supreme Court of the country.

Last but not least, we should have everyone do their own jobs as jack of all trades rarely succeeds.

According to Wikipedia, dark is defined as absence of visible light and has appearance in black color. Scientists explain dark object as object which absorbs photons and therefore appears dim in comparison to other objects. They believe universe is composed of only 0.5% of stars and rest is darkness. Einstein’s famous theory of relativity also talks about darkness that it’s the empty space that causes the universe to expand rapidly. General public relates dark with evil, shadows and depression. Believe it or not some enthusiasts tried to measure speed of dark and came up with few theories but no one has the exact answer. First theory says that darkness does not move. It’s always present everywhere and it’s the light which overlaps. In other words, consider darkness as table top and light as table cloth. When you pull table cloth from top of table, table becomes dark (which was already present from the beginning). Second theory states that darkness travels at the same speed of light. Both are opposite and equal forces. When one force is absent the other force takes place.

Let’s try to use our common sense (in reality it’s not very common) and see if we can come up with any explanation or answer. Consider that you are standing in an illuminated air tight room with all doors locked and no windows. You are sure that nothing can come from outside. Now, immediately turn off the light. Room went dark and now you can’t see anything. Did you see darkness coming in or spreading across the room? Where did it come from as room was locked? This proves our first theory that darkness is present everywhere and it’s the light which overrides darkness for limited time.

Apart from all this useless discussion, I think, I’ve found speed of darkness. I calculated speed of dark… oops, I can’t see, it’s too dark here.

The dilemma is that small percentages of people are aware of the problem that fresh water is not only consumed for drinking but also used for irrigation and industry. Since last decade fresh water which was an old problem in rural areas, is becoming a huge issue in urban areas as well. On March 22, 2011, UN will hold seminars and meeting in different countries to raise awareness and encourage people to (ref: 2011 advocacy guide),

• Raise the profile of urban water challenge and generate commitment to tackle this crucial issue.
  
• Facilitate policy dialogue and implementation partnerships for lasting water service improvements.
  
• Promote innovative solutions to provide safe water and sanitation to growing informal settlements.
  

In order to resolve water shortage issues, UN also provides various solutions. Like, providing water and sanitation services in the growing area in informal settlements. Local government and water distribution authorities should ensure water supply in all parts of city including informal settlements. Waste management should be handled properly and encourage recycling as both break and increase issues in water cycling process. We think of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) as United States government supported organization responsible for aviation and spaceflights. But, you might be surprised that NASA is helping UN by scientifically studying world water cycle. It looks at fine details of natural water cycle that includes measuring changes in snowpack and groundwater level, soil moisture in farms and amount of water consumed by vegetation. According to NASA’s scientist Bradley Doorn, program manager for agriculture carbon, and water applications in Applied Science Program of NASA’s Earth science division, we play a key role in trying to understand the supply and demand issues of water. For some people it may seem an easy job that we are just monitoring water cycle through satellites and processing images but there are lots of unknowns which makes it difficult.

References:
http://www.worldwaterday2011.org/
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/

• The strong man is not the good wrestler; the strong man is only the one who controls himself when he is angry. — Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)
   
  
  
• The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one. — Elbert Hubbard
  
  
• If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate. — Thomas J. Watson
  
  
• How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young—or slender. — William James 
  
  
• The course of true love never did run smooth. — William Shakespeare 
  
  
• In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer. — Albert Camus
  
  
• The perfect is the enemy of the good. — Voltaire 
  
  
• Don’t forget to love yourself. — Soren Kierkegaard 
  
  
• Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either. — Golda Meir 
  
  
• The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men. — George Eliot 
  
  
• If my aim is to prove I am “enough,” the project goes on to infinity—because the battle was already lost on the day I conceded the issue was debatable. — Nathaniel Branden 
  
  
• Two and two do make four. Nature doesn’t ask your advice. She isn’t interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
  
  
• It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not. — James Gordon 
  
  
• Your emotions follow your thoughts, just as surely as baby ducks follow their mother. But the fact that the baby ducks follow faithfully along doesn’t prove that the mother knows where she is going! — David Burns 
  
  
• In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth? — Carl Rogers 
  
  
• To foster a society of total happiness is to concoct a culture of fear. — Eric Wilson 
  
  
• Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, regeneration, the initiation into a new state. — George Eliot 
  
  
• We sense that we are impostors. Keeping our feelings a secret, we assume no one on earth is as neurotic, no one as uniquely flawed. — Diane Ackerman 
  
  
• The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. — Ralph Waldo Emerson 
  
  
• God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can change, and the wisdom to know the difference. — Reinhold Niebuhr
  
  

is Operator

• Checks if object is of given type.
• Never throws an exception even if object is null.
• Returns True or False.
• When used in “if” condition, then CLR has to perform two cycles to check if object can be typed cast.

  Example code:
  

  // Here, car is object and Car is given type.
  Car car = new Car();
  if( car is Car )
  {
      // car is of type Car.
  }

as Operator

• Type casts object to given type.
• Never throws an exception even if object is null.
• Returns converted object if object can be typed cast to given type else null.
• CLR has to perform only one cycle if object can be typed cast to given type.

  Example code:
  

  // Here, o is object and Car is given type.
  Car car = o as Car;
  if( car != null )
  {
      // car is of type Car.
  }

Conclusion
Use “as” operator when possible because it improves performance and doesn’t throw exception.

• Open Visual Studio 2010 and click on New Project. Select ASP.net Web Application as project type and click OK.
  
• Select Project from Solution Explorer, right click and from Add menu select New Item.
  
• From Add New Item menu, select ADO.NET Entity Data Model. Give descriptive name and press Add button.
  
• Select Generate from Database and press Next button in Entity Model Wizard window.
  
• Create New Connection or select Existing Connection from connection dropdown. Press Next button to continue.
  
• For simplicity, we are selecting three tables which are Address, Contact, and ContactType. But, you can choose any number of tables according to your requirements. Press Finish to complete wizard.
  
• Compile the project and make sure there are no compilation errors. At this point, we have successfully added Entity Model. Let’s add WCF Data Service in our project.
• Again, select project, right click and from Add menu
  select New item.
• From New Item window, select WCF Data Service and press Add button after providing descriptive service name which is AdventureWorksService in our case.
  
• Visual Studio automatically opens AdventureWorksService.svc.cs file with comments how to link WCF Data Service with Model.
  
• Replace highlighted /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ with Entity Model name which will be AdventureWorksEntities in this case.
• By default, WCF services are secured. We need to add some code so we can access data unrestrictedly. Inside IntializeService method, add following code,
  config.SetEntitySetAccessRule(“*”, EntitySetRights.All);
  
• The modified code will look like this,
  

   

• That’s it. Now, you are ready to consume WCF Service Data. Press F5 and run project. You see following output,

  

• Now, you can access your entities by typing names of entity in URL. For example,
  http://localhost:58638/AdventureWorksService.svc/Addresses
  http://localhost:58638/AdventureWorksService.svc/Contacts
  http://localhost:58638/AdventureWorksService.svc/ContactTypes

You can download complete source code from here AdventureWorksWCF. If you have questions please don’t hesitate to contact me.

• Silverlight
  

  It’s defined in Microsft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll and Microsft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.Runtime.dll assemblies.

• JavaScript
  

  It’s defined in SP.js file.

• Managed
  

  It’s defined in Microsft.SharePoint.Client.dll and Microsft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll assemblies.

Keep an important thing in mind, Client object model is not equivalent to Server object model rather it’s a subset. These client object models communicate with SharePoint through Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). WCF service is named as Client.svc. Communication between client and server object models looks like this,

As, you can see above, every request from client comes as XML request and gets JSON response back. To understand clearly, let’s compare server side model with client models.

In next posts, we will develop various small applications to find out how easy it is to interact with SharePoint 2010 from client side.

Blogs & Websites:

• http://www.windowsclient.net
  
• http://www.codeplex.com/wpf
  
• http://wpfdisciples.wordpress.com/
  
• http://blogs.msdn.com/tims
  
• http://blogs.msdn.com/jaimer
  

Books:

Pro WPF in C# 2010: Windows Presentation Foundation in .NET 4

This book is designed for developers encountering WPF for the first time in their professional lives. A working knowledge of C# and the basic architecture of .NET is helpful to follow the examples easily, but all concepts will be explained from the ground up.

WPF 4 Unleashed

Thorough, authoritative coverage, practical examples, clear writing, and full-color presentation make this one of the most widely acclaimed programming books of the last decade.

Application = Code + Markup, Charles Petzold

Windows programming legend Charles Petzold covers in parallel the two interfaces that make up the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). From the outset, the reader can shift focus seamlessly between Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) and C# to see them as flip sides of the same processes. Beginning in the first chapter, Petzold presents the general syntax of the XAML and corresponding programming code with numerous illuminating examples on how the two correspond and interrelate. The book builds on this base, providing the classic Petzold Windows user interface (UI) treatment, to show Windows developers how to create next-generation interfaces for their applications.

XAML
One of the main objectives of WPF is to provide a “Unified approach to UI” and let developers focus on coding and designers on creating a design. Microsoft provides an ingenious declarative programming model to define UI. Extensible Markup Language (XAML) not only allows you to define UI but also improved data binding, animations and application styles/themes support. XAML is based on XML style to define objects, properties and logic. Please don’t mix XML Schema Definition (XSD) with XAML as later is much more powerful. You may be thinking XML based structure, has a bad reputation of providing slow performance but Microsoft solved this problem by converting XAML into BAML (binary representation of XAML) at compile time. Let’s take an example and try to define a button in XAML and C#,    

<Button Width="100">OK
    <Button.Background>
    Green
    </Button.Background>
</Button>

Button b1 = new Button();
b1.Content = "OK";
b1.Background = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Green);
b1.Width = 100;

Both generates the same output and are equal. You might be wondering, if I can do it in C# then why I need to learn new declarative language XAML? The answer is coming shortly as there are certain things which XAML can do easily and are quite difficult to do in C#. Plus, XAML is designer friendly and one can use Microsoft Blend (like Photoshop) to define great application UI. Visual Studio also provides a graphical designer to design an amazing UI based on XAML. Idea is to separate UI from logic which is similar to ASP.net web development concept where we have UI defined in ASPX pages and logic in code behind files.

WPF Architecture
Before, we look at core features of WPF; let’s look at WPF architecture so we can see how different layers are interacting with each other.

Figure 1: WPF Architecture (from Microsoft)

The core features of WPF shown in yellow are completely managed by WPF. In the middle, WPF Composition Engine shown in black, is very important and responsible for rendering and managing content inside another content. What that means, you can have a video inside a button instead of simple button caption. Now, don’t take it wrong, WPF is not just about rich user interfaces rather it provides different ways of intelligent data binding, support of XPS allows you create PDF style reports and documents and many more. Furthermore, WPF provides an easy way to integrate your legacy windows applications, media DirectShow, hardware acceleration, DirectX, full advantage of GPU, resolution independent user interface and ClickOnce deployment.

WPF Features

• Style:
  Groups different object properties so that other elements can use it easily. For example, you want to have two buttons with green Background and FontSize of 14. One way is to set Background and FontSize of individual buttons but better way is by defining a style and then using that style in buttons. Like this,
   

  <Style x:Key="greenStyle">
      <Setter Property="Button.FontSize" Value="14"/>
      <Setter Property="Button.Background" Value="Green"/>
  </Style>

  Now, you can use above style in buttons.
  

  <Button Style="{StaticResource greenStyle}">Next</Button>
  <Button Style="{StaticResource greenStyle}">Previous</Button>

• Template:
  You can completely change control UI but keeping its basic functionality. By default buttons are rectangular but by defining button control template you can have button in circular shape without losing its basic functionality like click event etc.
  
• Layout:
  Layouts provides base for application usability and play very important role. WPF provides a set of different layouts, each having unique characteristics.
  

  Canvas:
  Only layout panel which allows you to specify control position in terms of X and Y coordinates. Always keep in mind an important behavior of Canvas that you cannot set Left and Right or Top and Bottom with same element. Let’s say, you set Canvas Left to 200 and Right to 100 then Right will be ignored.

  <Canvas>
      <Button Canvas.Left="18" Canvas.Top="18"></Button>
  </Canvas>

  DockPanel:
  Dock controls without requiring any calculation of X and Y coordinates. Docked element will fill entire width or height of panel.
  

  <DockPanel>
          <Button DockPanel.Dock="Top">I am at top</Button>
  </DockPanel>

  StackPanel:
  Stack elements from Left to Right or Top to Bottom depending on Orientation of StackPanel.
  

  <StackPanel>
      <Button>Save</Button>
      <Button>Cancel</Button>
  </StackPanel>

  Grid:
  Most popular and default panel added by Visual Studio.
  

  <Grid>
      <Label Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="0">Name</Label>
      <Button Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1">Save</Button>
  </Grid>

  WrapPanel:
  Similar to StackPanel but it wraps elements to next row or column depending on orientation.
  

• Data Binding:
  Data binding is the process that establishes a connection between the application UI and business logic. Normally, we consider data binding as binding of input controls to data centric elements like dataset etc. But, in WPF, you can bind to any CLR object including ADO.net or objects associated with Web Services and XML data. Key namespace used in Data Binding is System.Windows.Data.Binding.
  
• 2-D, 3-D imaging:
  WPF provides a list of power API’s which include Brushes, Shapes, Images, Geometrics, Transformations, Animations, Visual and 3D. Using these API’s you can easily create stunning user interface instead of gray windows.
  
• Audio & Video:
  WPF has a built-in support for wav, asf, mpeg, wma, and avi audio and video formats.
  
• XPS documents:
  WPF provides complete support of XPS document generation, print, XPS viewer and Open Document Conventions(ODC) for use by any device.
  
• ClickOnce deployment
  WPF applications can be deployed using traditional MSI setups or ClickOnce. ClickOnce allows you to not only keep track of application version but also updates application automatically if user is using older version.
  

Hopefully, WPF introduction has given you basic understanding about WPF. In next articles, we will take deep dive and explore WPF in detail.