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New Post: Do you plan on making BlingScala.Net?

mcdirmid — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 11:51:27 GMT

I think there is already some interesting FRP solutions for Scala. I know they were working at something at the EPFL when I left.

New Post: Do you plan on making BlingScala.Net?

AlunaSoftwares — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 23:22:11 GMT

I started learning Scala and now that we all know that it will very soon be on the CLR do you have any plan on remaking the bling code in scala so that it becomes an incredible scala wrapper to wpf/silverlight/xaml.

Scala is so clean and flexible, i would prefer bling scala over XAML for UI design.

New Post: Getting a MediaUriElementBl for Bling & WPFMediaKit

davehorner — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:39:55 GMT

I am interested in using the MediaUriElement with bling/wpfsignals.

I wanted to try the LightBoxView sample with the MediaUriElement/MediaUriElementBl instead of Image/ImageBl.
However, when I try using MediaUriElementBl I hit a snag..

LightBoxView.cs(30,64): error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'MediaUriElementBl' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

MediaUriElement ultimately is a D3DRenderer : FrameworkElement.

I am wondering if this is possible and if any of you had thoughts on how to quickly get MediaUriElements working with Bling.

Thanks!
--dave

New Post: Physics/CustomBlocks, What am I missing here?

davehorner — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:04:45 GMT

Looking now at the physics page @:
http://bling.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=physics&referringTitle=Home

It does say "This page out of date! I'll have to redo the tutorial for physics. The abstractions have changed in Bling 3, for the better mostly."

I believe that I am using what would be considered "trunk": "wpfsignals-blingui.svn\Bling\Presentation\bin\Release\Bling.dll" Is this considered Bling 3 or something else?
The examples are wonderful, and yes magical. I've got quite a bit more playing to do, I don't yet fully understand how everything works...awesome stuff though.
Might I suggest that we add a mention of the need for Start() on this physics page or on the other "redo" of the tutorial.

Would it be possible to provide placement/view for PhysicsCanvas when Start() has not been called? Maybe perform calcs for initial placement and then freeze....
Or is it it more complex than that? (The need for a call to Start() is no issue for me, I ask out of curiosity)

There is quite a bit of code and example there to consume so I expect much of my questions to be answered there...given some time.

Thanks again,
Dave

New Post: Physics/CustomBlocks, What am I missing here?

davehorner — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:52:16 GMT

That was my missing piece. Works just as it should now.
Thank you!

New Post: Physics/CustomBlocks, What am I missing here?

mcdirmid — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 06:54:20 GMT

The examples are probably a bit too magical, you have to start the physic canvases timer manually (the slide holder in the tutorial does this automatically):

namespace BlingUITabControlTest
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Interaction logic for MainWindow.xaml
    /// </summary>
    public partial class MainWindow : Window
    {
        public MainWindow()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            Strip s = new Strip();
            tabItem1.Content = s;
            s.Start();

        }
    }
}

New Post: Physics/CustomBlocks, What am I missing here?

davehorner — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 21:52:59 GMT

I threw together a sample of what I was talking about. Let me know what you think.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5668823/BlingUITabControlTest.zip

Thanks!
--dave

New Post: Physics/CustomBlocks, What am I missing here?

mcdirmid — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 08:28:28 GMT

Could you port or send me the code in question?

(sean.mcdirmid@gmail.com)

New Post: Physics/CustomBlocks, What am I missing here?

davehorner — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 19:00:10 GMT

Been looking at bling ui for a little while now. Seems pretty expressive and concise.
I am interested in the physics portion of bling ui. I have had success doing the simple hello world label with thumbs and lighting within my own project.

However, I can not figure out what I am doing wrong when it comes to using Physics/CustomBlocks within my own project.

Maybe I am creating the view incorrectly?
I am using a tabcontrol with a tabControl_SelectionChanged event, and creating my view like so:

namedtabitem.Content=new Strip();

Where Strip() is the same class as is found in Bling.UI Physics.Tutorial, except where it references images, it now references images within my own custom solution.
The PhysicsCanvas shows normal image controls, thumbs, sliders, etc outside of PhysicsBlocks fine. But the controls within my PhysicsBlocks don't seem to show up.

I am confused, what I'm missing?

Any insight would be appreciated!
THanks,
--dave

New Post: Off-screen render targets?

mcdirmid — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 02:08:31 GMT

I forgot to mention: if you want to use a WPF render target buffer to output the result of a shader, the result won't be hardware accelerated (it won't run on the GPU). If you want to render off screen, your best option is DirectX.

Now for PixelShader 2.0, this is a limitation of WPF in .NET 3.5SP1, WPF 4.0 uses 3 or 4.0, so you have a lot more instructions to work with. I haven't really updated Bling to 4.0 yet, there are some breaking changes in 4.0 that i have to work through (mostly to do with layout) as well as the need for to overhaul Linq Expression code and access a new custom build of the WindowsAPI code pack.

New Post: Off-screen render targets?

MrSparkle — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 14:05:23 GMT

Thank you very much. I guess I can live with that. I really like the workflow with Bling!

But one thing I found when trying out the sample application: When compiling the NormalMap-Shader, I get an Exception that the number of instructions are too many for PixelShader 2.0.

Best regards,
Christian

New Post: Off-screen render targets?

mcdirmid — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 00:47:48 GMT

Depends. If you want to bypass WPF all together, then you can just use off screen render targets in DirectX. Check out the Diffusion.cs file/example in DirectX examples. You have to write your shader in DirectX rather than WPF, but this just means writing a quick vertex shader to indicate a simple one tile geometry (again see Diffusion.cs). This is a one way street...you can output the results to WPF if you want, but because of burn through issues (WPF and DirectX are not very compatible) you have to use a separate overlay window to layer WPF elements ontop of the output (again, done in Diffusion.cs).

But the nice thing about render target bitmap...you could render WPF elements to it. You can just render shader results to a DirectX buffer.

New Post: Off-screen render targets?

MrSparkle — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 17:32:21 GMT

Hi!

Is there a way to render the output of a shader to a off-screen render target with Bling?
I'm looking for an alternative for the WPF's RenderTargetBitmap.

Best regards,
Christian

New Post: Animating individual items in ListBoxBl

cammcad — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:49:51 GMT

Any guidance on how I might use this library to animate individual items in a ListBoxBl as it loads or unloads? Even in scenarios where I'm filtering on a view and I want to animate each item out of the view? Is this even possible?

Or should I do it the conventional way... which is to create a custom panel and utilize CompositionTargetRendering to render each item after it's been measured?

Still trying to wrap my head around this library, but would really appreciate any guidance on the subject.

-Thanks

New Post: Any thought...

endquote — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:12:35 GMT

I'd also love to see this in Silverlight. For what it's worth, google up "silverlight multibinding" and you'll see a couple of implementation of multibinding from the community.

New Post: Bling and Dorling Cartograms/Visualisation

mcdirmid — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:23:16 GMT

I can't publish design prototypes of course, but I try to take specific tricks I used to build these prototypes and create examples from them. Overall, I need to be more focused in what examples I choose and how I present them. I'm working on a big feature upgrade for Bling now as well as a rebrand (ya, that means a name change, but I also want to redo all the documentation and how I market this API), where I hope to solve these problems.

New Post: Bling and Dorling Cartograms/Visualisation

seraph321 — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:23:02 GMT

+1 for easier Bling data visualizations.

btw Sean, you mentioned that a lot of what you create with Bling can't be published, but are you actively keeping a list of things you (and others) create that CAN be shown? I would love to see more examples to learn from.

New Post: Bling and Dorling Cartograms/Visualisation

tropicster — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:07:24 GMT

Hi Sean,

I think it is the right approach to continue with WPF and take of advantage of GPU acceleration and DirectX 10 and push the boundaries there, I think Bling is incredibly promising in this respect and pushes WPF in the right direction.

I personally would love to see more data visualisations in Bling, because for me that is where I can see it gaining momentum as a technology due to the high interest in data visualisation and the gap in the market for good WPF visualisations/interactions/experiences . No one in the WPF world has really come out with a good visualisation library and for me this is where it loses ground to Flash/Flex. Sometimes I am a little envious of the tools available for Flex guys (Flare being a great example) when you want to build next generation visulisation-based applications and experiences.

A Flare port to Bling would be amazing.

Thanks

Jay

New Post: Bling and Dorling Cartograms/Visualisation

mcdirmid — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:11:53 GMT

These are definitely applications that Bling is meant for. I tend to do these on a case base case basis, and often the designs are proprietary so I can't put them into the publicly available sample code.

For comparison, Flare is based on action script, so their code can run directly in web browsers. There is no version of Bling yet for Silverlight, so it isn't very web friendly. On the other hand, Bling is able to take advantage of GPU acceleration, and has support for DirectX 10, so it has more headway on the flashiness of visualizations you can use it for. Since Flare is under a BSD license, it would be useful to look at their code and see if I could make any improvements to Bling especially to support visualization needs.

New Post: Bling and Dorling Cartograms/Visualisation

tropicster — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:57:02 GMT

Hi Bling Team,

Fantastic work on Bling, very impressive.

Do you think Bling could be used to create Dorling Cartograms?

I can imagine that a visualisation with Bling physics and interaction would be fantastic.

Similar to :

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Bubble_Chart.html

But with bling goodness.

Have you also considered how Bling can be used for Data Visualisation? As a WPF alternative to Libraries like Flex, Prefuse?

http://flare.prefuse.org/

Many thanks

Jay