WPF too slow?

I'm just looking for a new VSE (= Visual-Control-Element)-design. Using DirectX will propably be overdone but WPF is too slow in a first approach showing 10 signals with 1000 line-segments per Polyline. The overhead is truely too big. So I googled a bit and found a comment of Marco Zhou (Zhou Yong) who proposes using a WriteableBitmap for WPF-GDI-access. Unfortunately, this throws away all the cool stuff of an UIElement, but who needs databinding a static signal anyway?

Using the aforementioned technique, my sample runs at least as smooth as SOMNOlab :)

Now let's try to put some UIElement-biosignal-events atop of it and the weekend is near ^^

SOA again, 2 new blogs to read

On wednesday, I had to return SOA und Webservices in der Praxis of Herbert Burbiel to the bib. Unfortunately, there was a reservation on this book. Anyway, I wouldn't have the time to test this promising ASP.NET-world. I'm really astonished how easy it is to write a webservice or -client with .NET - not a great difference to a normal windows forms application. So, the book is great; however, it uses examples of .NET and Java and makes every step (write a client, write a service, make a db-connection) twice, if not thrice (Java, C# and VB.NET). Actually that showed me that the .NET-way is the right one for me ;)

On my journeys in the web, I recently found two great blogs about WPF (Windows Forms - someone needs that anymore?), or better say two great minds writing about WPF: John Gossman and Josh Smith. See Karl Shifflett (not John Gossman...) talking about MVVM here - I love that guy :) (more to come about MVVM soon!).

Linq in Action, Toolbar

Last week I finished Linq in Action. It's a great primer on Linq: it covers Linq to Objects, Linq to SQL, Linq to XML and a bit of Linq to DataSet - i.e. everything ;) I read it from the start to the end and I assume this book isn't supposed to be read like this, because in the three main chapters (to Objects, SQL, XML) some basic queries are described again and again. Well, just turn that over :)

I really liked the chapter about Linq2Sql. It's so easy to use a database-access with Linq. Just make a connection and raise your queries. If you're working with small databases, take that. Although the Entity Framework has the favour of Microsoft, I hope, Linq2Sql will survive to make life easy.

In the book there are a lot of good examples going beyond the ordinary book-examples. For instance, there are performance-considerations in which cases Linq is significantly slower than "old style" for each and how to overcome the performance loss.

I read it in German - don't do that if you're tetchy in things of misspellings like me. If you're getting a paycheck for every found mistake like for a Knuth book, you will get rich :/

One thing I missed are ExpressionTrees. They are mentioned only in a small paragraph :(

And now a big discovery which I haven't seen in all the years I work with Win XP: "Symbolleisten". I accidently dragged my CVS-folder-link from my desktop to the top of the screen and released it. I never ever did that before. Now I have on the right of my desktop a toolbar for the CVS-DotNet-folder and on the left a CVS-ActiveX-folder. Fast access to the components :)

87.24%

We recently did a PRC1 (= post release candidate...) survey amongst serveral MCC-coworkers. They were asked to install the setup on their private PCs and do a quick test. We did learn two things:

1) NTFS isn't the only filesystem. Two of our students used FAT32 to be able to mount the harddrive to their parallel linux-installation. Unfortunately, FAT32 doesn't support hardlinks so that our hardlink.bat fails. The next version will put all dlls and exes into one directory *puh*

2) Arial Narrow resides only on about 87.24% of Windows-Installations. I changed the one usage of Arial Narrow to Arial - at least 97.13% coverage...