Windows Tips and Tricks

Computers and the Internet have been a boon for genealogy buffs. Now Microsoft may be getting into the game with a program called Family.Show 2.0 that was announced in a recent blog. I can’t tell from the blog exactly what Microsoft plans to do with the program. At the moment it seems to be some sort of demonstration project but with hints of future development. Here’s what the announcement says:

Three months ago, we launched Family.Show, our first end-to-end reference sample for WPF. Family.Show is a genealogy program that demonstrates the usage of WPF for a complex, realistic scenario. If you’re a fledgling WPF developer who wants to pore over some code that demonstrates best practices for application construction, there’s nothing better out there today.

As is Microsoft’s wont, details are sketchy. Actually, there are no details, just puffery. The program is available at this site. To show what I mean by lack of details, that site has a big heading. “What is Family.Show?”, and the answer that is given is:

For a hobby that revolves around dead people, genealogy is remarkably popular: it’s the fastest growing scene in North America. And a perfect study for our first Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) reference application.

Our designers employed every trick in the WPF book– styles, resources, templates, data binding, animation, transforms– to present an innovative visualization of the classic family tree, freeing our developers to concentrate on behind-the-scenes features like XPS, Windows Vista “light up”, and ClickOnce for WPF.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 10:44 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.