A very good article by Jon Rista on custom configuration settings in .NET 2.0. Good stuff to know that is hard to find.

Let the converting begin! Mike Swanson has just released a Flash/SWF to WPF converter! Totally cool!

This MSNBC article talks about the US Mint introducing its third attempt to introduce a dollar coin to the American public. I will go on record right now that this coin is just as doomed to failure as the other attempts. Before I go into why, let me start off by saying that I love the idea of a dollar coin. I'm sick of having too many dollar bills in my wallet (I use a money clip so lots of ones become a nuisance).

Why will this coin fail like the others? One reason - its size. Pure and simple. Once again, the new dollar coin will be barely larger than a quarter. For all intents and purposes, it is the size of a quarter. I, and many others I assume based on past failures, hate this!!! Why? Well, if I have a pocket full of change, its nice to be able to reach in and find, by feel, the correct coin. It also makes them more visually distinctive so if I am browsing through a handful or purseful of coins, I can find the dollars much easier than picking through all things the size of a quarter. I have, on several occassions, received Sacajawea or Susan B. Anthony's (back when they were around) by accident, in place of a quarter.

I know the theory is that making the coins the size of a quarter makes it easier on machine vendors support them, but the simple fact is none have. Besides maybe the Post Office (and not sure of that), I cannot recall ever seeing a vending machine that would take dollar coins. So why not make the new dollar coin the size of a 50 cent piece? No one really uses the 50 cent piece so you will not have to worry much about confusing the coins in your pocket. Its a nice size - not too big or too small. It would look great at that size as a gold coin. I would much rather have four "50 cent size" dollar coins than four dollar bills. But you make it the size of quarter, and I wont use it. Maybe I am weird that way, but that is how I feel.

Very good article that explains the relationship of .NET 3.0 to other releases and how to deploy the latest version of .NET.

Good news on the CardSpace front. I, for one, am really hoping this takes off since I am very weary of all the username/passwords I have to keep track of.

It seems Miguel de Icaza, leader of Mono, seems to not like WPF at all. I have seen other quotes about it, but this snippet,

Most of what Microsoft calls .Net Framework 3.0 is due to be implemented in Mono, with the exception of the Windows Presentation Foundation, which de Icaza says is “over-engineered, over-architected, and too large” . Even that may come if market forces require it.

reminded me of his distaste for WPF. I am not sure I really understand his dislike. Ok, I understand the reasons he gives, but I am don't really agree. Is WPF big? Yes. Is it complex? Sort of (there is a lot in there but it all makes sense). Is it to large? Well, on WPF/e will do 90% of what WPF will do and it weighs in at about 2MB and that includes a subset of the CLR, so how big can it really be. I know he is talking about APIs, but seriously, its the successor to WinForms (and a whole lot more) so its going to be big.

To me, I think there are some things behind the scenes that make WPF unattractive to Mono. First, it is a ton of work. The wave of .NET technologies and the pace at which they are coming has got to really make the Mono guys cringe. Just compare the sizes of the development teams and see who has to work harder just to keep up.

Second, WPF can do things that will be very hard to reimplement on Linux. All of that coolness leverages a lot of the DirectX infrastructure for both feature and performance. That is even more work for the Mono guys to do if they want to match both features and performance. Performance is the real tough nut since Mono perf has its share of critics in some areas so I suspect this would be one more area that Mono would struggle.

Lastly, and this is a bit more minor, is tooling. WPF almost requires tools. Yes, some folks are doing some amazing things just hand-coding stuff, but for wide spread adoption you need good tools. Mono's target developer is not exactly a fan of buying tools, so someone has to create them. That is a lot of work since WPF does a lot of things.

Just my two cents and fire from the hip thinking. Of course, I won't get into my thoughts on just being copy cats (I know, they have some GDK+ stuff that is original, but come on).

Charles provides a nice write-up on converting WPF EXE to browser delivery XBAPs.

Create some great eye candy using this WPF 3D Object Library!

WPF is a great platform for data visualization, but there is a lot of work to do to make that happen. Here is a decent WPF charting library to help get you started.