Back from the Dead

Its been a while since I actually blogged, getting back into the habit again, so stay tuned.

xamDataGrid, NetAdvantage For WPF

I have been using the Beta version of Infragistics WPF toolkit for a couple of months now and have given it some slack but I am somewhat disapointed with the recent production release in a number of areas;

1. Peformance is bad, really bad, to the point where I can not justify using this for a major project that I am working on, and am seriously looking for an alternative, Xceed comes to mind.

2. There appears to be no ability to generate Summary rows in the xamDataGrid, this for many users is a very important feature, and I use it frequently for financial reports that  I need to generate for the client.  It is interesting that there is a Header concept but no equivalent Footer concept, BTW Exceed has this!

3. Did I mention that performance is bad !!!!!, this really is the show stopper as far as I am concerned.

I am willing to give this toolkit a chance, but the above issues need to be addressed soon, otherwise I have to find an alternative.

Web Services on Wall Street Part II

Looks like my collegue hit the spot at this weeks (14th Feb 2007) Web Services on Wall Street.  The session was well attended and I managed to answer a number of the attendee’s questions as well

WeakReference be damned

Nice come back on the reasons for the usage of WeakReferences

WSonWS

I will be spending my day today at the WSonWS conference, a  collegue of mine from Eikos Partners will be presenting, if you are there check out the session entitled ‘Microsoft .Net 3.0: A Serious Play for SOA on Wall Street?’

Tiger on HP

Given all of the hype around BootCamp and Parallels on the Mac, to allow the running of XP/Vista on Mac hardware, I started to wonder if the reverse was possible, i.e. running the Tiger OS on my trusted DV6000 from HP.  Why you may ask would I want to do this, firstly because I like my HP, secondly battery life on my HP running Windows is approx 5 hours, but on the Mac it is about 2 hours, and no extended battery can be purchased, and finally because I do not want to buy another laptop, I already have too many to count, and do not want to buy yet another one.

Reseach on the web, has not provided any information, perhaps I am asking the wrong question, so I decided to talk to an Apple employee at one of their stores.  It seems that I was the first person to ask the question, ( I find this hard to believe ), the tech support guy in the store was a little suprised I asked my question, and came up with the following reply ( this is summariezed version  )

Tiger will only run on hardware that has a special type of memory chip, the OS looks for the tweak and will only run if this tweak is found.

Take this for what it’s worth, a little more digging is needed I think, and perhaps a little experiment of my own, does anyone know where I can get a copy of Tiger for free ?

Mini Meltdown

A mini Bill Gates melt down

My next Laptop will be a Mac

Another Windows Guru has moved to mac, other of my collegues are considering the move as well, perhaps its time that I give in and plunge head first into Mac Land, now that Mac runs Windows

Can you spot the baby

If you have nothing to do, then see if you can spot the baby in this picture

 

How long did it take you ???

Do you need a clue ??

Infragistics & WPF

It may not be free like Exceed’s Grid offering but worth having a look, check out the Beta WPF from Infragistics, I am sure there will be a flood of WPF components comming very soon.  I still think its a pity that Microsoft did not see fit to include a DataGrid implementation themselves, ah well.

Here is one of the Samples from the Beta, the example assumes that you have 3.0 already installed on your machine.