One of my colleague's asked what is fill rule,

"The 'fill-rule' property indicates the algorithm which is to be used to determine what parts of the canvas are included inside the shape. For a simple, non-intersecting path, it is intuitively clear what region lies "inside"; however, for a more complex path, such as a path that intersects itself or where one subpath encloses another, the interpretation of "inside" is not so obvious."  - From the SVG Spec January 14

the following set of pictures will help understand the need for specifying the fill rule for self intersecting paths,

Fill Rule: Even-Odd

Fill Rule: Non Zero

1. System.Windows.Media.GradientBrush does not contain a definition for 'AddStop' 
   • Equivalent using GradientBrush.GradientStops.Add(...)
2. System.Windows.Shapes.Ellipse does not contain a definition for 'CenterX/Y'
3. System.Windows.Shapes.Ellipse does not contain a definition for 'RadiusX/Y'
4. System.Windows.Shapes.Path does not contain a definition for 'FillRule'

• use ((PathGeometry)Path.Data).FillRule

I will add more to this list as I find them...


Updated 16-Sep

Just finished downloading & installing WinFS beta 1 on my XP machine.

Already noticed a couple of things, If u copy a .doc file into the "Default Store" and double click it is opens fine, but if I copy a ".chm" into the "Default Store" and double click it, it opens and just displays the content tree the main content area has a error message, i guessing some security issues.

Update: The following KB link helped me solve this issue http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896054/

Here is the initial release of the Blender to XAML python export script.

Blender is a awesome free Open source 3D Animation & Modelling platform, download it and give it a try.

PURPOSE:
    To allow rudimentary XAML export capabilities.  Currently the goal is to
    support just the geometry,Solid Materials & lights.
    Texture & Animation will be in the next version.

IMPORTANT:
    You probably need the FULL python installation (2.3) to run this script.
    If you have problems, get the python installation from
    http://www.python.org , make sure also to set the 'PYTHONPATH' variable



 USAGE:
   Select one or more objects and execute this script (ALT+P)
   Be Sure to select a Camera & Light :) if "Exported Selected" is on.
   Everything that CAN be exported, will be written to the export file.
   You can change the export filename by entering the path and filename
   in the dialog.  If you do not enter a path, the export file will
   appear in your blender directory.

   The Color Sliders on the top represent the Ambient Light in the "World"

LIMITATIONS:
    Your mesh "M U S T" be triangulated before you execute this script.
    If you don't there will be holes in your mesh.
    Only exports triangular meshes,spot/point light,materials & camera currently.

    Texture coordinates & Normals are NOT be exported. 

NOTES:
    If you would like to contribute, or make modifications, send your mods
    to me and I will incorporate them into the next release which I am currently working on
    for everyone to enjoy.
    Please don't distribute modified copies of this file without contacting me
    first!

Here are some of the screenshots of the XAML Export script in action. I truned off the OSA(AA) to compare the rendering in Avalon (WinFX) to that in OpenGL based blender.

Attended Tech•Ed 2005after a gap of 4 years!

The First day Started with laser show (which I am getting a little tired off, from last 8 months I have seen the same laser show with the same music and the same patterns at different venues, good ROI for the company which sells this ;-))

First Break out session i decided against the Architecture Track( I have gotten tired of all the SOA talks) choose to attend "Analysis Services Soup to Nuts" by Praveen Srivatsa that turned out to be a good choice I really enjoyed the total demo approach that Praveen adopted for this session. The BI Studio really looks good, I need to install the beta pretty soon to try it out.

Second Breakout session I choose the "Dealing with data in SOA" hoping that it might give me a different view, but soon i was bored out of my wits, check out for a early lunch. It turned out that was a good move too. I had my lunch peacefully, soon there were snaking lines as the buffet counters.

After lunch I attended a session titled "Enabling applications for multi-core platform and the software tools to support the process", it turned to be a bad choice, I believe that we all should seriously consider the multi-core processor's in our near future but the the session just was a display of Intel's tools, rather and actual information/ tips on multi-core applications/ programming.

The last two sessions on Domain Specific Language's were quite informative, they first introduce the need for DSL's and gave a glimpse of how DSL can be created in Visual Studio 2005. 

I skipped the evening entertainment program and headed home to avoid the Bangalore traffic, felt great :-)

Came across a good listing of Common Sources of Processor Performance Penalties: Five Issues , Rico Mariani’s Blog also has good information related to performance. Wiki on performance topics.

I was playing around with the new anonymous delegates feature of the Visual Studio 2005 (widbey), I wondered if i could use the this to write for age old data structures in different way, and here is the result!

class ADStack<T>
{
     delegate T popdelegate();
     private popdelegate popper= null ;
     public T Pop()
     {
          return popper();
     }
     public void Push(T value )
     {
          popdelegate oldpopper = popper;
          popper = delegate {
                popper = oldpopper;
                return value ;
          };
     }
}

Find the latest interview with Andres Hejlsberg.

In this he talks about one my per peeves in .NET 1.x. "People do a lot of database access, and yet there are some pretty notable impediments to interactions between databases and programming languages. One of these mismatches is the absence of nullable types from programming languages. SQL databases have always had nullable types, but programming languages have never had nullable types."

His thoughts on XAML "One of the trends I think is interesting is the integration that is happening with programming models like ASP and XAML, which are mixtures of declarative and programming code that give you an amalgam of two different programming disciplines."

And this is exactly the reason I give my employees/clients for .NET based developments "The unique value proposition for .NET is that all languages ride on a common runtime and therefore the learning curve...well, 10 or 20 years ago learning the syntax of a language was 50% of the learning curve, and 50% was its APIs; indeed it might have even been that the language was more. Now, the API is the overwhelming learning curve, 95% or better. So, having a common API regardless of your choice of language is an enormous benefit!"