This week I finally got my seven video tutorial of "how to make a 3D carousel" completed and posted to the Blend Series collection on www.learnexpressionstudio.com
You would not believe how many people had emailed me in the past asking for a demo of this and of course everyone wants the source code for it at the same time. So I got it done but unfortunately I cant give it away for free as this undermines the business model that pays for all the video content to be posted and watched by many people.
The Carousel is a great control and is certainly one of the first controls that many people see when they see WPF for the first time, and immediately people want to replicate that control to get the same kinds of response. Where it all falls down with WPF is when someone wants to go that one step further and add the control to some Silverlight application that they have been working on, only to find that 3D elements are not supported. My solution allows for the control to be used (or at least replicated) in both desktop and Silverlight development by taking a panel based control such as the canvas and modifying how it lays its child elements out, all done with high school level trig maths to boot!
If you are a subscribed member to the Blend service, then you can go and watch the series now as well as download a sample application with all the source code for you to play with and extend.
After a very busy tour of the US, I returned home on Thursday morning and started to try to catch up on various chores I knew had to be dealt with. One of those is reading the mail and responding where required and to my surprise I found an email from the Microsoft MVP support team telling me I had been awarded and MVP!
It capped off a great week where I got to meet all of the people at Microsoft that I have been communicating with for a few years and take in the lovely city of Seattle. For the most part I believe it rains a lot in Seattle but whilst I was there, I didn't see a drop, just glorious sunshine.
Getting the MVP doesn't change much for me as I will continue to try and help people where I can although the big benefit is that I will now get to take part in a lot more events as well as go back to Seattle next year for the MVP global summit.
