New product announcement. Just a quickie folks!

We have been mulling this over for a while now and have decided to press (pardon the pun!) ahead with a new Windows WordPress Plugin Management application (developed in C#) which is targeted at WordPress Plugin developers.

Features for the first version are not finalised yet but it will definitely include functionality to login to your WordPress account, browse your installed Plugins, create new Plugins, edit existing Plugins, and lots more besides!

There is still a lot to think about, but more details will appear soon, so keep checking back and be sure to let us know any comments, and what you think, as well as any suggestions for features that should be a priority. How would an application like this make your WordPress Plugin development easier, and more streamlined etc?

Oh my goodness, has it been that long since our last blogs/site activity!? We have been working hard on other projects recently, but I am pleased to say that we are back now and working on new and exciting gwycon projects.

One thing in the pipeline in the near future is a test/labs area on gwycon where we will be creating and experimenting with new (and existing technologies) such as Flash, Silverlight, WPF, C#, JavaScript, Ajax, PHP 5. Most of this information will be freely accessible but we are considering making certain sections available to subscribers who can access premium content. Any content accessible by subscription only (such as source code, scripts, windows applications etc.) would of course be Ok for users to implement in their own projects royalty free! Let us know what you think.

David

You may have noticed that things have been a little quiet on the blog front lately, apart from a few updates on new WordPress Plugins we have been creating.

The reason is that this has been taking up most of our time. But it is time well spent, as we have managed to produce 4 quite useful (we think!) WordPress Plugins in a little over 6 weeks.

You can see the fruits of our labour, at our WordPress.org Plugin directory page.

We will probably not be producing any new Plugins for WordPress, at least not for a while. But, we will be adding some nice new features to our existing Plugins. Any suggestions by the way, be sure to let us know!

We do love WordPress though, it is a great environment for developers to get their teeth into, and features a rich API to enable programmers to create some really great additions to the core WordPress Blog.

We will be getting back to C# development over the next couple of months, and also concentrating on SEO/SEM. This field is moving along rapidly and a site can really benefit from a deep understanding of the current technologies. If you have any requirements in this field than we would be happy to discuss them with you.

We already have clients who need a dedicated SEO/SEM solution and are working with them to enhance their web presence. Our next client could be you, so please do get in touch if you have any ideas you need help with.

Watch out for further announcements soon!

See link at the bottom of the post for information on how to download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, or just go straight to the Microsoft Visual Studio site here.

The next major release of Microsoft’s Visual Studio development environment is apparently going to be developed with the front end GUI written in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). Much of Visual Studio will still probably be written in C++, there will be significant portions of it developed with C# and WPF. WPF as many of you may know is the new Windows Forms API that is set to supersede the current version that has been around since the .NET 1.0 framework was released. Although there are other existing fully fledged applications developed in WPF, one of which is Microsoft’s Expression Blend 2, Visual Studio 2010 is certainly going to be the largest application that makes use of the new WPF technology. WPF has attracted a lot of attention over the last year or so as it is based on a completely different structure to the more traditional Windows forms. Here is a run down of just a few of the features available to WPF developers:

• 2D and 3D support baked directly into WPF.
• New and more flexible structure for handling events (via ‘Routed Events’).
• All Form elements are vector based and so resize to the parent container without loss of quality.
• Many new layout controls for a much more flexible UI. Things like fluid layouts (similar to web applications) can be developed very easily).
• Separation of the UI design from the code behind. The UI is designed using a new language called XAML (pronounced ‘zammel’).

This means that you will have some cool IDE tools available in Visual Studio 2010 such as being able to resize the code window (zooming in and out) rather than having to select a specific pixel size for your fonts. continue

Ok, so any self respecting site developing applications for the desktop and the web needs to be able to display code clearly. This means formatting it so it is laid out in a similar style to the code editor it was created in. So, mono-spaced font type and code highlighting is essential to making your code readable to others. Of course this doesn’t simply mean covering HTML and CSS languages to code highlight, and be assured that will be posting code snippets in a whole range of programming and scripting languages!

With this in mind we have implemented a system to highlight code written in many different programming languages. See below for a couple of quick examples:

Here is some formatted C# code:

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using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
 
namespace WindowsFormsApplication22
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }
 
        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            MessageBox.Show("Hello World!");
        }
    }
}

Below is some more formatted code. This time XAML (XAML, or Extensible Application Markup Language, is the new mark-up language used in Microsoft’s WPF language).

This time no line numbers this time, so this gives us flexible options for displaying formatted code:

<window x:Class="WpfApplication6.Window1"
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
  Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">
  <grid>
    <textblock Text="Hello" Height="21" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
     Margin="10,10,0,0" Name="textBlock1" VerticalAlignment="Stretch"
     Width="120" Background="Coral" TextAlignment="Center" />
  </grid>
</window>

continue

Polynomial Explorer is an application developed in C# using Visual Studio 2008. It was written to graph and display a polynomial equation with terms included up to the 6th degree (x⁶). Any combination of terms can be displayed and each term is controlled by a slider to alter a terms coefficient value. The user interface has been designed so that the equation is displayed clearly and the terms can be altered in an intuitive method via the slider controls. continue