Telerik has just released two TFS tools : TFS Work item Manager and TFS Project Dashboard.  And the best part is : They are FREE.  yes you read it correctly FREE.  Inf act Telerik released them, but it is Imaginet Resources who build tehm.

The tools are fully build using Telerik's RadControls for WPF, which should give a great user experience, and it is.

The version now released is still in beta, so you still could encounter a few bugs.  But they have a great forum, and looking through the forum posts they do a great job with replying to the problems.

I already did a quick test and it looks good.  Going to deep dive in it the next couple of days/weeks.  Especially I want to see if it's better than the Episerver dashboard we are using for the moment.  Also I will hceck it against the Conchango Dashboard, because the version we have in our company of teh Conchango Dashboard is very slow (They have a newer version so i will check that also).

Just encountered 2 problems for the moment:

1. Starting up the taskboard from within the Work Item Manager works, but not the taskboard settings sometimes gives an error on opening.
2. Didn't manage to startup the project dashboard.  It gives me a black screen.

Find all info here : http://www.telerik.com/products/tfsmanager-and-tfsdashboard.aspx

A screenshot

While I was learning WPF I saw that there was a spelling check possibility added to the textbox and richttextbox. It works nicely, the only thing that I didn't found out then was how to change the language library so that you could use the spelling check for the Dutch language instead of the English (and default) one.

Finally I have more info about it:

First of all at this moment only the English, French and German language library's are available (I quote that this was at the end of February 2007).

When having a textbox, the language of the spellchecker depends on the language of the control, while for the richtextbox this depends on the typed text.

For the textbox you could change your language using this statement: x:lang="en-us" or x:lang="fr-fr".

You can find more info here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms788718.aspx

Yesterday I also saw a blog article by Gill Cleeren, where he stated that the spell check comes from the Office dictionary. Have to look at it.

Yesterday we had our .Net 3.0 event with sessions about WPF, WCF and WF.  It was a big success.  The comments we heard afterwards from the attendants were good.

The first session, presented by Gill Cleeren and myself, was a no slide presentation.  It was a try out for us, but what afterwards we heard only positive comments.  Unfortunately we had too little time.

The second session, done by Kurt Claeys, had a very high level.  He did a deep dive into WCF and WF. Just like us, the time was a little too short for Kurt.

You can download here my demos.  The demos of Gill can be downloaded here.

I want to thank all the attendants and if you have any comments or questions about the event or the presentations or the demo’s, you can always leave a comment or send me a message.

Update :

You can find the article about this event also on our corporate blog.
Here are some images:

The Ordina’s N-Technologies team would like to invite you to this event, which will include 2 sessions.  It will be held the 24th of november 2006.

In the first session Gill Cleeren and Sven Cipido will show you more about WPF.  We will show you the capabilities of WPF by showing you many examples. 

In the second session Kurt Claeys will talk about WCF and WF.  He will use a typical developer case to show you how SOA can be implemented in .Net 3.0.

Gill Cleeren, a colleague and friend of me wrote an article about styles and triggers in WPF.

In this article, Gill Cleeren focuses on the aspect of styles and triggers in Windows Presenation Foundation. Styles make it possible to create applications with a uniform look and with a high level of maintainability. Triggers allow WPF styles to change one or more properties in response of a user interaction. In this document, we will use both these technologies to create a richer user experience.

You can find the article here.