WPF Improvements on the way

Found this information today on Scott Gu's blog. All great news about WPF improvements that are on their way.

WPF Performance Improvements

This summer we are also planning to release a servicing update to WPF that includes a bunch of performance optimizations that improve its text, graphics, media and data stack. These include:

- Moving the DropShadow and Blur bitmap effects, which are currently software rendered, to be hardware accelerated (making them many times faster). The APIs for these effects will stay the same as they are today (which means you do not need to change any code nor recompile your apps to take advantage of these improvements).

- Text scenarios, especially when used in Visual and DrawingBrush scenarios, will be substantially faster. The APIs for these scenarios also stay the same (which means you do not need to change any code nor recompile to take advantage of the performance improvements).

- Media and video performance scenarios will also be much faster (also no need to change any code nor recompile to take advantage of the improvements).

- We’ll be including a new WriteableBitmap API that enables real-time bitmap updates from a software surface. We’ll also be adding support for a powerful new effects API that enables you to build richer graphics scenarios.

- We’ll also be including new data scalability improvements that can be leveraged for data editing scenarios. These include container recycling and data virtualization support that make it easier to build richer data visualization controls.

WPF Control Improvements

Later this year we are also planning to release a number of new controls for WPF. Included in the list we are working on are DataGrid, Ribbon, and Calendar/DatePicker controls.

VS 2008 WPF Designer Improvements

We are also planning to release a servicing update of VS 2008 that includes a number of feature additions to its WPF designer. These include event tab support within the property grid for control events, toolbox support within source mode, and a variety of other common asks and improvements.

Comments

Excel XIRR and C#

I have spend that last couple days trying to figure out how to run and Excel XIRR function in a C# application. This process has been more painful that I thought it would have been when started. To save others (or myself the pain in the future if I have to do it again) I thought I would right a post about this (as post about XIRR in C# have been hard to come by). Lets start with the easy part first. In order to make this call you need to use the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel dll. When you use this dll take note of what version of the dll you are using. If you are using a version less then 12 (at the time of this writing 12 was the highest version) you will not have an XIRR function call. This does not mean you cannot still do XIRR though. As of version 12 (a.k.a Office 2007) the XIRR function is a built in function to Excel. Prior version need an add-in to use this function. Even if you have version 12 of the interop though it does not mean you will be able to use the function. The

Password Management

The need to create, store and manage passwords is a huge responsibility in modern day life. So why is it that so many people do it so poorly? This is a loaded questions with answers ranging from people being uneducated, to lazy, to educated but not affective in their methods and many more. This blog is to help those (in some way even myself) around me strengthen their online security. Why does it matter? To answer this let's look at a few numbers. According to the US Department of Justice (DOJ)’s most recent study , 17.6 million people in the US experience some form of identity theft each year. Ok fine but that is identity theft that has nothing to do with password management. What is one way someone can start getting information about who you are? How do they get access to steal your money? From Cyber Security Ventures 2019 report : "Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that healthcare will suffer 2-3X more cyberattacks in 2019 than the average amount for other industries. W

Experience Profile Anonymous, Unknown and Known contacts

When you first get started with Sitecore's experience profile the reporting for contacts can cause a little confusion. There are 3 terms that are thrown around, 1) Anonymous 2) Unknown 3) Known. When you read the docs they can bleed into each other a little. First, have a read through the Sitecore tracking documentation to get a feel for what Sitecore is trying to do. There are a couple key things here to first understand: Unless you call " IdentifyAs() " for request the contact is always anonymous. Tracking of anonymous contacts is off by default. Even if you call "IdentifyAs()" if you don't set facet values for the contact (like first name and email) the contact will still show up in your experience profile as "unknown" (because it has no facet data to display). Enabled Anonymous contacts Notice in the picture I have two contacts marked in a red box. Those are my "known" contacts that I called "IdentifyAs"

Uniting Testing Expression Predicate with Moq

I recently was setting up a repository in a project with an interface on all repositories that took a predicate. As part of this I needed to mock out this call so I could unit test my code. The vast majority of samples out there for mocking an expression predicate just is It.IsAny<> which is not very helpful as it does not test anything other then verify it got a predicate. What if you actually want to test that you got a certain predicate though? It is actually pretty easy to do but not very straight forward. Here is what you do for the It.IsAny<> approach in case someone is looking for that. this .bindingRepository.Setup(c => c.Get(It.IsAny<Expression<Func<UserBinding, bool >>>())) .Returns( new List<UserBinding>() { defaultBinding }.AsQueryable()); This example just says to always return a collection of UserBindings that contain “defaultBinding” (which is an object I setup previously). Here is what it looks like when you want to pass in an exp

Sitecore EXM 9.1 Performance and Scale

When working with Sitecore EXM it seems like one question everyone has is what level of performance can you get out of it. As with most things, the answer is "it depends". However, there are a number of things that go into this and things to think through and adjust to try to get a high rate of sending. Sitecore Hacker has a good blog post on scaling EXM . As I spent time trying to scale my own instance I wanted to break things down a little more and provide some more concrete examples on steps takes to performance tune and performance I have seen. Let's breakdown some specifics about the architecture to help you understand where you might stand. I am running in AWS with a dedicated Content Management server, a dedicated dispatch server, a dedicated xConnect Server and of course a dedicated database server. Here are the specifications for all. Content Management: 16 gb RAM, 2.3 Ghz 4 core processor. Dedicated Dispatch: 16 GB RAM 3.0 Ghz 8 core xConnect: 4 gb RAM

Toad's Code

Search This Blog