Richard, I know what WPF means, but what is it. Is it the markup of a layout through XAML or something, like the 2010 ribbon? And how does WPF mingle with dotNet, is it an extension to it or a completely different thing altogether…? And why can’t we use it yet…?
Pete, bringing your dad in is really no fair you know… it’s realy not! Maybe some mxs guru here will adopt me and we’ll have a fair fight…
Cheers,
-Johan
Damn! this could escalate quickly. You could end up with Paul Neale on your side, and I bet he fights dirty. What if I got my Dad to hold the towel?
I’d tell you if I knew for sure, Johan
near’s I could figure out, the XAML describes the interface rather loosely… i.e. what you want on it, and how it should be aligned relative to parent elements and such.
The layout engine of choice then actually turns that into a layout to be popped onto the screen… essentially the width/height and x/y coordinates. There’s multiple layout engines, can even write your own.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752299.aspx#Add_Layout
Then there’s the renderer, which actually displays the controls, along with visual styles, etc.
WPF is a part of .NET 3.0 – think of it as something like an alternative to the windows Forms.
As to why we can’t use it ‘yet’… I haven’t looked, but I guess you should be able to use it? You can certainly customize the 2010 ribbon; but you’ll have to do so by hand until ADSK releases an editor for their flavor of XAML (existing editors seem to have issues with the 2010 XAML files)
Hey, you can check this research I did on WPF and that only I could run
<conspiracy mode>well, Kameleon, that’s just a plot between Microsoft and certain interested parties to have everybody move over to 64bit platforms</conspiracy mode>
back on-topic… it should be pretty simple to filter those out semi-automatically… but the “semi-” part alone actually makes it about as much work as just removing those lines yourself / making a copy of the rollout for editing, edit, and then merge the changes into the original. The latter is a good idea anyway as one of the bugs I was referring to earlier is that the visual maxscript editor tends to mangle code layout, isn’t able to deal with variables, etc.
How eloquently put, I’d say it just sucks… *runs
Another good thing about doing it yourself is the sense of pixels in for example a rollout for a scripted modifier, I can now fairly confidently estimate button width and offsets when building UI’s for modifiers… yes indeed I can do that… hmm what’s my point again…
-Johan
Thanks everyone for the responses. JHN, those are some great tricks you shared! I will definitely start using some things like that. I am certainly not ready for all the crazy dotNet / WPF stuff you guys are talking about, those are things for me to learn in the future.