Seesmic for Windows: a rundown with Loic (Updated)

posted on November 18, 2009 by Bryant Zadegan

Update: Part 2 has been added after the jump.
Update 2: added the link to last year’s Sensor Platform interview with Dan Polivy (as noted in part 2).
This interview was recorded on Tuesday, November 17, 2009.

As the first of my interviews from PDC, I noticed that Loic Le Muer was quick to familiarize himself with me as a part of the interview. This fact coupled with his persistent praise for the Seesmic devs who worked on Seesmic for Windows have led me to believe that Seesmic might actually be one of the better small software companies in existence.

Loic demonstrated Seesmic for Windows at PDC 2009 during Tuesday’s keynote. The obvious difference between Seesmic for Windows and Seesmic Desktop (the AIR version) is that the Windows client is native and written on top of the .net CLR. The plus sides to this include far better performance figures, a more Windows-integrated UI, and a lower tendency to leak handles (and fill my ram). The only downside to this is that it’s Windows-only… well, until you realize that moving .net code from a Windows native environment to Silverlight is actually not nearly as bad as writing another app from scratch.

My interview with Loic takes a browse through Seesmic for Windows v. Seesmic Desktop. I also decided to run through Silverlight Seesmic with Loic during our quick block of time, and while the Silverlight version still requires some polish before going live, the Windows preview version is solid enough for everyone to take a look.

Both parts of the interview can be found below the read link. Blame YouTube for forcing me to split a 13 minute video.
My thanks goes to Andrew Lyle from neowin for manning the camera.

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Tweak DWM from your programs, Part 2

posted on August 27, 2008 by Stan

Following the first part of the Tweak DWM from your programs series, we are going to explore the actual usage of the Desktop Window Manager API in a Windows Forms-based program. The test application–included in the source package–also makes use of glassbarGlassBar, an extension to the existing control set.
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Tweak DWM from your programs, Part 1

posted on July 21, 2008 by Stan

With Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced a whole new window manager which provides a better experience to the user and an independent graphics surface to us developers by taking advantage of graphics acceleration hardware (your graphics card or integrated GPU).

In a three-part blog post, I will show you how to use a wrapper around the Desktop Window Manager Application Programming Interface in order to control its state, change colorization, or change the rendering policy of windows from your Windows Forms and .NET 3 Presentation Foundation programs.

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Tutorial: How to work with the System Tray from .Net

posted on June 2, 2008 by Karl

After I released the System Tray tile for the Sidebar, I’ve had quite a lot of PMs and emails regarding interacting with the tray from .Net. So I’ve written this short tutorial for you all to go through to help with any difficulties you might have been having. It’s written with C# source code.

How to work with the System Tray from .Net (PDF)