All I'll say is: WTL FTW! :-)

Paul A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.

Ruby and IronRuby

Paul A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.

I had a similar dilemma a while back. My solution was to purchase an Apple Airport Extreme. It has the capability of sharing both hard drives and printers via the USB2 port on the back. You can also connect a USB2 hub to the port to share multiple devices.

Paul A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.

I'm a photographer on the side. I really enjoy taking portraits, mostly of families and children.

Paul A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.

I'll vote for using a Mac Mini. They have enough processor to decode HD video. Elgato's EyeTV tuner and software works really well. The Mini can be connected to your television through VGA or DVI, and the audio output is optical. You just need the right cable -- 1/8" optical to SPDIF. An external hard drive (or Drobo) gives you all the storage that you might need. Apple's FrontRow interface is decent, but a lot of people like Plex better.

Paul A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.

Go to http://www.mupromo.com/ and spend $50. Parallels 4 is one of the applications in the bundle. :-)

Paul A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.

I'm already using Ruby on Rails and jQuery for the AJAX and interface magic. I tried Prototype and its ilk, but they didn't "click" the way jQuery did for me. Honestly, I'm about ready to do away with ASP.NET now. I jumped ship from PHP about seven years ago when ASP.NET was first released. Now that the Microsoft ecosystem has become so unnecessarily bloated and complex, RoR looks and feels like a much better choice. Plus, it gives me an excuse to do most of my dev. work on a Mac. :)

Paul A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.

Just read through the MSDN documentation. They usually give examples for the various classes in C# and XAML. Everything you do in XAML is converted to IL under the hood. It might be easier to think of XAML as a compiled language that just happens to be XML-compliant. In .NET 2.0, Microsoft separated the designer code and code-behind into two separate files using the "partial" keyword modifier on the "class" keyword. The result of compiling XAML is pretty much the same — a partial class that matches the one in your code-behind file. Just do a Google search for "WPF without XAML" and you will find more information. It's basically like writing WinForm code by hand, without designer support.

Paul A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.

"The Forgotten Framework" a.k.a. "Build an object oriented Windows application that is under 100kB". :)

Paul A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.

I totally agree with you on this. At work, my boss thinks that WPF and WWF are the best inventions ever. Personally, I can't stand either one, and I have used both in fairly involved applications. One thing that makes WPF a little more bearable is to code the UI directly in C# rather than using XAML. I know it's a throw-back to the pre-UI designer days, but the fact that nothing is hidden and you can understand all of the connections is a wonderful thing. you don't have half defined in the XAML and half in the code-behind with the (non-) Intellisense being the only thing to connect the two in the editor. Give it a go in plain C# and see if that doesn't help restore a little of your sanity.

Paul

A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.

TextControl produces PDF files that are not very efficient. It appears that it converts a lot of textual information to images, bloating the file and causing it to take a long time to render on slower printers. NOT recommended.

Paul

This has got to be one of the most awful controls that I have ever used. The whole thing is a COM object with a .Net wrapper around it. We have encountered situations where it would not read a file that it wrote. Avoid it if you can!

Paul

Either carpentry (cabinet making in particular) or teaching.

Paul

Here's a little more information: If I create a subclass of WindowsFormsHost and override the OnKeyboardGotFocus method like this:

[DllImport( "user32.dll" )]
private static extern IntPtr SetFocus( IntPtr hWnd );

protected override void OnGotKeyboardFocus( KeyboardFocusChangedEventArgs e )
{
base.OnGotKeyboardFocus( e );
SetFocus( editor.ActiveTextAreaControl.TextArea.Handle );
}

I can direct the keyboard focus to the editor control, but the cursor never appears. If I override OnGotFocus in the same way, I can see the cursor blinking but the keyboard focus doesn't change. If I override both, I get the keyboard focus but no cursor.

Paul

I haven't tried to embed a WinForm control in a WPF application until now, so I may not be doing this right. When I create the WindowsFormsHost and add the WinForm control (the TextEditorControl from SharpDevelop) I cannot programmatically assign the keyboard focus to the WinForm control. First I tried using the Focus() method on the control itself and on its text area. I never see the cursor blinking and keyboard input is ignored. Then I used interop to pull in the user32.dll function, SetFocus(HWND) which when called with the control's text area Handle makes the cursor blink in the control, but keyboard input is still ignored. I created a subclass of WindowsFormsHost so that I could set some breakpoints on the various On*Focus methods. The only thing that I can see is that OnLostKeyboardFocus is called when I manually click on the text editor control, but the KeyboardFocusChangedEventArgs.NewFocus argument is null, which means the new control is not recognized by WPF. That makes perfect sense since the control receiving the keyboard focus is a WinForms control. So, any thoughts? Has anyone ever encounter this problem before? I have been searching on Google for hours and have not come up with anything. Thanks!

Paul

Fly R/C airplanes and helicopters. Very relaxing once you get over the "pucker factor". :-D

Paul

I agree! There aren't as many Apple-centric developer sites available as for Windows. I'd really enjoy reading (and contributing to!) "Apple Project".

Paul

I had a customer like that. He kept bugging me for things, but was really bad about paying me (owed thousands for months.) The next time he called, I told him what my "new" rates were and that I'd be happy to help him. He never called me back. :)

Paul

A friend of mine in college was a CS major, and blind. He had a laptop computer with a braille terminal underneath it. Later he upgraded to a better laptop that had a smaller braille terminal and text-to-speech software. The synthesizer talked very quickly, but he said that he got used to it in a pretty short time.

Paul

There are many controls in Cocoa, like sheets and drawers, that no other framework or platform has. Qt #ifdef's those controls out by default. Developers are welcome to enable them, but then you have source code that will not compile on multiple platforms, even though it uses the same base framework. Qt (and other cross-platform UI frameworks) force your application to behave according to some lowest-common denominator. To me that is unacceptable; users of the various operating systems have some level of expectation of what applications "should" look like on their chosen platform. Learn Objective-C and Xcode. You may surprise yourself and like it!

Paul