This is a good tip for all who are who are running Windows 64-bit:

To be able to host a Silverlight 3.0 in a frame in a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Application on 64-bit Windows, you may hit some obstacles your WPF application will load the 64 bit version of IE – which cannot load Silverlight currently.

Now, IE is really an x86 application, even when running in Windows x64. So, the actual real issue is mshtml. mshtml comes in both 32- and 64-bit flavors.  Since by default the WPF application is compiled as processor agnostic (bingo!), it floats to x64 and gets the 64-bit version of mshtml.

Therefore, try this to resolve: Compile the WPF application as 32-bit.  The project’s “Configuration Manager” in Visual Studio should be able to help with this.

I have seen this in the labs in MSFT Corp Redmond at the Centre of Information Work for some time. I am so glad that it is finally out and will be available to the public.

What is even more cool is that the user interface of Surface is done in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). How about that ?

Some people are still questioning my thoughts about what's so good about GUI, WCF and such.

Take a look at http://firstlook.nytimes.com/ and see what I mean. This NY Times Reader appears to be the best Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) app to hit the streets. As iterated by Scott here, it was first available to @nytimes.com and @microsoft.com users and now it is available to all.

It adapts well to your device and screen resolution and I think Scott pretty much sums it up in his post.

Sex Visual sells, the more erotic exciting, the better. It is not a debatable statement. In the conferences I have been in, audiences will find a visually-appealing demo much more engaging than one that sells plumbings and gnarly XSD'isms. No, I am not saying one is a better technology than the other. What I am saying is that - Eye candy engages - and that, to me, is half the battle won.

Most people still dont know and dont want to know what goes at the server-end side of things and all those messy EAI, ESB, AIX, HL7 blah blah adapters, protocols and such and they shouldnt. I am betting that SOAP will become as obscure as TCP/IP one day and that SOAP talks will disappear from mainstream technology conference agendas one day. Have you ever seen talks on HTML or TCP/IP these days ?

While people will wow at the new programming model of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously - Indigo) and the wonderful separation of technical impediments from business contracts and logic (my demo of Reliable-Messaging in WCF usually drives this point home when I changed the bindings from Http to Tcp to MSMQ without touching a single line of code), the audience will instantly applaud the first vector-graphics, 3D Animation WPF application they see. And they could easily do the most complicated GUI very easily with mimimal .NET code.

To showcase a wonderful WCF application and what transcends underneath the hood and what goes onto the wire, you would still need a good GUI application to show the listeners, dispatchers, plumbings at work. In many cases, you would want to use WPF to enable that for full effects. (Hey, since they have downloaded the .NET 3.0 runtime, you might as well make the best mileage out if it and use all its components, right ?)

Well, it looks like my friends VittorioB and CraigM has already gone on that path with their amazing WCF Live Service Trace Viewer. Yes - there is a WPF component in there as well.

I remembered speaking to some people during an architectural review as well as during a "Meet the Experts" Lounge in the just-recently concluded Microsoft TechED Asia 2006 in Malaysia and I made the comment where I said something to this effect:

If I had to re-live my career for the last 3 years with the hindsight of today's technologies, I would NOT have chosen to go down the server technology route with MTS, COM+, WS-*, Web Services Enhancements (WSE), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously - Indigo), I would have chosen GUI and focus on client-side technologies with the benefit of knowing what Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) could bring ...

Some people asked me what I really meant what I said. I do ... and ... apparently, David Chappell has the same thoughts as me as well.

Besides being deeply involved in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously - Indigo), I have also been very engaged with the technologies of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

I will be blogging actively on these 2 technologies as we move towards Vista