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Birmingham University Talk - Lap around WPF

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Yesterday, I travelled north to visit Birmingham Computer Science department to give a guest presentation on WPF to a large lecture theatre's worth of students. I think that will be my 4th presentation there in 3 odd years so it's kind of a regular gig, even though I was filling in for Team Academia, and a pleasure as always.

As promised to the students who attended and the lecturer, Dr Edmonson, here are the slides (unfortunately I can't upload the code although there are plenty of great demos around to look at)

laparoundwpf

The talk covered the following topics:

1. Introduction and look at the history of Operating Systems and their user interfaces
2. Value of User Experience in current and future software
3. What is .NET 3.0?
4. WPF, it's architecture and XAML
5. Demo - live coding bonanza
     - Layout and controls
     - Data and DataTemplates
     - Templates and Styling
     - Triggers and Animation
6. Summary and demo of New York Times reader

As part of this module Dr Edmonson allows industry speakers like yours truly to propose essay topics and the one which we came up with in his office before hand which I think marries the real-world/industry direction and the academic research world really well is:

Is Vista a move in the direction of an invisible OS/Application? (or words to that effect)

My old team mate Andy Sithers will be doing the marking and I'm sure I'll get roped into helping.

And as a challenge to the students who attended my talk - if you have any questions about the talk, WPF or how you think you should approach the essay then leave a comment/question in the Comments section of this blog entry.

Academic Tech Talk - Windows Presentation Foundation.pdf

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 10, 2006
    If any of the attendees are interested in pursuing a job involving WPF at a location just outside Birmingham they might like to consider the company I work for, Paragon Simulation (www.paragonsimulation.com). We have already deployed a WPF based application at a major company with government links, and are getting very good feedback on it. Feel free to contact me for more information (sam dot jack at paragonsimulation.com)

  • Anonymous
    November 22, 2006
    Is Vista/WPF a step towards invisible OS/Applications? Hi Mark, I wonder if you could offer any advice regarding the essay approach? I've been reading through tons of info on 'invisible computing' and ploughing the abyss of human/computer interaction literature available. However, I'm unsure as to how you actually define 'invisible' when it comes to the OS/Applications. Additionally, many of the sources I have found for such information are web-based. Could you advise how this material should be referenced and, perhaps more importantly, define how I could clarify such sources as being credible? Many thanks

  • Anonymous
    November 22, 2006
    Invisible means to me, how can I interact naturally (voice, touch, keyboard/mouse, minority report style,etc) with a computer AND have it respond and give me data in a way which I don't have to interpret. E.g. when I search for people I ask for "Joe Bloggs" out loud and brings back a visual display with all the photos of Joe Bloggs in the phone book. Currently, how is this done (hint: lists and text with page loads and waiting for web servers to respond). But that could just be my thought process :-) Also, if you want to bring it back to a more practial level then I would advise you looking at the work/research that goes into User Experience. It's a big area of work and will come up with suitable evidence of how software creators apply best practices to how a user interacts with an application.

  • Anonymous
    November 23, 2006
    That's great. Thanks for the speedy reply!