Rather than point you to another interesting happening out there on the web, today I thought I’d show you something from one of the book’s I’m currently editing. The book, as you’ll have guessed from the image is called Pro WPF: Windows Presentation Foundation in .NET 3.0 and is being written by the extremely talented Matthew MacDonald.

The excerpt I’d like to show you comes from chapter 17 of the book and introduces the new WPF concept of Flow documents. Broadly, WPF seperates your docs into two types type-set documents for printing – fixed documents – and dynamic documents designed for viewing on a computer – flow documents.

I’ll let Matt take up the story…

Caveat: This excerpt’s not finished yet, it still needs another round of technical review, copy-edit and a few other bells and whistles before it’s ready for print. Also, we’re still working on the best way to convert them into HTML, so it’s a little rough around the edges. You’ll have to forgive any errors – the system will get a lot better very soon.

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There’s an interesting post on the WPFblog about the progress that’s been made with the speech API since the beta versions. Lee’s put together a (rather smart looking) app that Vista users can install via ClickOnce to demonstrate its capabilities.

Well worth checking out if you’ve got a few moments and a Vista machine. I’m not sure PC speech is going to take over the world just yet (remember the last time this was a hot topic in the mid 90’s?) but for specialist fields like call-centre switchboards, messaging services and medical prosthetics these APIs have got to be good news.

I won’t include a screenshot, as showing you an image of what a speech synthesizer looks like just seems daft!

Yahoo have been showing off their next generation Messenger client recently (you can find the video here).

It’s been built specifically for Vista using both the .NET Framework and the full might of WPF working natively under the new OS. As of this month, WPF ceases to be an extension to the Framework and is incorporated into the .NET libraries proper – i.e. it’ll be part of the standard .NET redistributable SDK – along with WCF and (to a lesser extent) WF.

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There’s a new WPF blog available here. It doesn’t get updated all that frequently, which is perhaps why I missed this post from a couple of weeks back.

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