Pixel-in-Gene

Recently I was doing a bit of PHP development for my blog and playing around with the WordPress APIs . After spending some time deciding on the IDE to use, I hit upon NetBeans 6.5 , which I think is an awesome tool for PHP development. It has fantastic auto-completion, syntax…

As many of you know my co-author Kevin Hoffman and I have been quite busy finishing up a book on WPF control development. We have few more chapters to finish and then we will be content ready for tech review. The first half of the book is already done and we are going through…

I have finally jumped on to Twitter and making sounds (tweets) on @pavanpodila . So follow me and I’ll follow you :-)

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working on an application that displays a variety of graphs. One of the standard features we have is the load animation for a graph when the user sees it for the first time. For a line graph, this would mean that the graph animates from…

Last night I was playing around with After Effects CS4 and made this video just for fun. Its nothing fancy, just some 3D shake and some particle effects. Unfortunately I did not save my project so I cannot post the * .aep file. I do have the rendered video, which you can see…

This is just a quick post on how to make dashed lines in Photoshop. I am sure many of the designers who are reading this would find it useful. Photoshop by default does not give you any direct way to draw dashed lines. However it has the very powerful brush engine that can do the…

Organizing and referencing assets (images, fonts, xaml) has always been an interesting topic of discussion. There is still no proper guidance and is wide open for experimentation. Organizing assets If you have few assets, you could just keep them under a folder in your main…

MarkupExtensions are a Xaml-only way of providing extensions to the markup. It allows you to encapsulate procedural logic and provide value to attributes (DependencyProperties) inside of a Xaml document. To create a custom MarkupExtension you derive from the MarkupExtension class…

Many of us have felt the need to have custom expressions inside of Bindings. The need has ranged from applying mathematical operators to calling methods on bound objects. For simple needs you can probably create a custom IValueConverter or a IMultiValueConverter that can do the…

Applying simple mathematical operations inside WPF DataBindings has always been a non-trivial task. By default the {Binding} or MultiBinding syntax does not allow the use of arbitrary expressions inside the Path. They are restricted to the dot-syntax of referencing properties on…