Don Xml's Grok This

If you are one of my regular readers, you know that I’m a senior .Net consultant out of New Jersey, and don’t do the traveling thing.  I’m sort of in between career plateaus, and trying to migrate from the 40 hours a week at one client style of consulting to having more then one client style.  If you know of someone ...

Microsoft recently release the first public beta of their Expression Interactive Design tool (aka Sparkle), and I finally can get a chance to play with it and publicly talk about it.  The most important thing to remember with this tool is that it is not geared towards the developer.  The code name Cider product is the analogous tool on ...

I recently began the process of reviewing the sessions for the PDC 2005 and setting up my schedule (which I never seem to follow).  The way I normally do this is to scan the speaker list, searching for my friends and those that I have mentally tagged as must see speakers, and checking out what/when they are presenting.  Once I have the ...

First off, I really, really wanted to love Microsoft’s latest graphics tool, codename Acrylic.  I down loaded and install the first public beta, and wasn’t impressed, but hey, it’s an early view into what they are doing, so I decided to cut them some slack (it is based on Creature House Expression, which MSFT bought in 2003).  I ...

Hmm, just heard about this news.   Does this show how scared Adobe (and maybe Macromedia) is of Avalon and XAML?  Over the last couple years there has been 2 major camps within Adobe, the PDF camp and the SVG camp, and both didn’t seem to like each other.  Some Macromedia employees have been known to slam SVG (although ...

With the announcement the end of last week that Microsoft is decoupling Avalon from Longhorn and will make it backward compatible with WinXP and Win2k3 Server, I’m sure there are some out there that wonder what my take on it.  First off, let’s get this straight, XAML does not equal Avalon.  Yes you can use XAML to wire up ...

I’ve known about the the ForgetFoo and his side project GotFoo websites for a while, but haven’t mentioned them on my blog.  It seems as though he creates all his own graphics, and has a bunch of cool javascript tricks to make his sites very unique.  The GotFoo site is a blog with a cool Outlook 2K3 skin.  Really nice.  His ForgetFoo site is the ...

Well, it took a little longer than I thought, but I finally got the current version of SharpVectorGraphics converted to run on .Net 2.0 and the Longhorn SDK (PDC build), and added a print feature.  Sometimes when you are experiencing some weird problems, it is best to drop back to the beginning and start all over.  Once I did that, converting the ...

While going thru the process of learning to convert SVG to XAML, I always had in the back of my mind that I would eventually write a tool that do this conversion automatically.  I had assumed that it would be a bit of a chore to do, and that I would use the SharpVectors project as a starting point, since it already has a SVGDOM and parsing engine, ...