Flog: The Official Fluid Blog

So as RIA developers, Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E) is of keen interest to us. It’s purpose is to ostensibly make some of the capabilities within the WPF runtime available to other platforms from the Mac to mobile devices. While Microsoft has loudly proclaimed that WPF was never intended to be a Flash-Killer, I wonder if the same can be claimed for WPF/E. From the limited information available, it appears like it _technically_ could be, but it’s obviously a long, long way from that. First, WPF/E would need to be bit for bit compatible between the various platforms. We’re talking pixel-level perfection, which is what we largely have with Flash today. Second, and far more daunting a task, they need to get market penetration on the level Flash has. How Microsoft would go about that is a big mystery to me. Short of getting Apple to build or bundle a runtime, I don’t know how they’d do it.

Here’s a brief video demoing a small WPF/E on a mobile phone that one of our engineers managed to track down:

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=126729&pvrid=107

If anyone has more details about WPF/E, we for one, would love to hear about it.

As anyone with any programming experience can tell you, formatting and unformatting Date objects into human readable strings can be a repetitive and tedious task, as well as a perfect target for a utility class!

These utility classes exist in the core package of most programming languages, but alas, not Actionscript. Luckily, Matt Kruse at JavaScript Toolbox created a simplified Javascript library based on Java’s elegant SimpleDateFormat class. As Javascript and Actionscript are syntactically compatible, porting this to Actionscript was very straightforward. Check out SimpleDateFormatter, hosted on the osflash website.