The PDC was a buzz with folks praising WWF. Please tell me a) what you think is cool about WWF and b) how it will improve your life or the lives of your colleagues or customers. Thanks!

A story about how the world would be if MS never existed.

I come from a world where I had a Mac at home and a Unix box at work, giving me the best of both worlds in the late ‘80s. After that, I got a job at Intel programming Windows 3.1 and wondered why the hell this piece o’ crap ran most of the world. 15 years later, I’m a happy Windows user and programmer. Did I change or did Windows?

I use my family as a litmus test of when things are “real” or not. None of them have technology backgrounds or training, so if something is real to them, it’s real. For example, it was my grandmother that asked whether she need Windows 95 (she didn’t have a computer, mind you). I head from my folks about spyware and phish attacks. And now, my sister-in-law asked me if she should be upgrading her Windows ME machine to OpenOffice.

Of course, OpenOffice isn’t an OS, but as far as she knows, MS Office is her current OS, so maybe OpenOffice is what she needs.

I believe that it’s in her best interest for me to steer her away from unsupported OSS software unless I want to become her tech support liaison (difficult, since I’ve never used OpenOffice). Also, she’s looking for “something that will function with little or no problems,” which I can’t claim of any software, free or not.

Still, it makes you wonder if these OSS guys could really make a credible play for the desktop. Obviously, they’re not going to produce Office 12 or Windows Vista anytime soon, but they’re nipping at our heels pretty credibly if they can attract the attention of the secular members of my family. How much longer before OSS becomes “good enough” for most uses and the latest thing you buy from actual software vendors is just fancier? In fact, how many actual software vendors do we really have left anyway?

Aha! I finally figured out where I know Shepherd Book from and I now understand the references to the fact that he wasn't always a Shepherd. At one point, when he was much younger, Book was Det. Ron Harris from the 12th precinct in Los Angeles! I believe the low point in his career was in episode 135 and 136 (a rare two-parter) where Harris turns a low-budget pornography investigation into a major motion picture. The series only survived another 14 months before Harris changed his name and joined the clergy, eventually ending up on the Serenity. It all makes sense! That Buffy guy is quite the genius... : )

John Gossman, architect on the Sparkle team, has just made a post about how Sparkle uses data binding to hook up the view of the data to the data itself.

Interestingly, his post isn’t about whether they used data binding — that’s a foregone conclusion. Data binding is so powerful that pretty much every non-trivial Avalon app will use it, and Sparkle (a large app with a very rich UI) uses the hell out of it.

The main thrust of the Model/View/ViewModel architecture seems to be that on top of the data (“the Model”), there’s another layer of non-visual components (“the ViewModel”) that map the concepts of the data more closely to the concepts of the view of the data (“the View”). It’s the ViewModel that the View binds to, not the Model directly.

I’ve been a fan of value converters (implementations of IValueConverter) for this kind of work, but John’s technique has its charms, not least that it allows for much more radical slicing and dicing than value converters allow easily.

Ian Griffiths, my co-author on Programming Windows Presentation Foundation, is very well worth your attention.

He was a colleague of mine at DevelopMentor and now teaches for PluralSight.

I’m on a private mailing list filled with the smartest people I know and Ian is the one we look to for the definitive word on a wide variety of wacky technologies. In spite of his tendency to write long missives covering huge areas (or because of it), he’s the one guy I always read on that list. He’s also graces the off topic mailing list a great deal and, of course, the blogesphere.

Ian wrote the XAML Appendix that Don so loves, as well as half the rest of the WPF book, including layout, custom controls and resources, all of which I constantly refer to. It goes without saying that his feedback made a huge difference in the quality of my own writing. When I asked Ian to co-author with me, I knew I was obtaining one of the community’s most potent secret weapons.

If you’re not an Ian Griffiths fan yet, you soon will be.

Charles Petzold taught the first generation of real Windows programmers.

Charles Petzold sold so many copies of Programming Windows 3.1 that he broke the MSPress accounting software.

Charles Petzold helped define what it means to write books for Windows programmers.

I’m a Charles Petzold fan. I’m also a fan of the other luminaries of this community, including Jeff Prosise, Jeff Richter, Matt Pietrek, John Robbins and Don Box.

They’re the giants that provide the provided the shoulders.

P.S. Petzold has literally sold more copies of Programming Windows 3.1 in a single quarter of the 16-bit years than I’ve sold of my books in a 10-year writing career.

How can you argue with someone so obviously intelligent?