Microsoft Germany is the first licensed customer of Buzzwords, our newest Microsoft Surface application. At the Hamburger IT Strategy Days 2010 —one of the most highly regarded IT events in the EMEA region— the application was used to demonstrate the latest Microsoft products.

Buzzwords enables users to navigate through various product categories using an eye-catching “stick menu”. Once a category has been selected, images and videos are displayed in a custom-branded screen and users can fill out a query form to receive additional information about products.

We teamed up with the marketing agency tisch13 to brand the application with Microsoft’s corporate identity. We also developed a second application based on the card game Memory to attract visitors to the Microsoft booth.

Check out the video below to see the Microsoft-branded version of Buzzwords. If you’re interested in learning more about licensing and purchasing options, we look forward to hearing from you.

ALK Solutions is proud to announce that it has been an official Microsoft Surface Application Solution Development Partner since October of 2009. Our company was selected because of our history of past projects and service portfolio: We have successfully implemented Microsoft Surface in numerous customer projects, and offer applications that exploit of the unique potential of this technology to provide a better customer experience in a wide range of usage scenarios.

We look forward to an ongoing successful partnership with Microsoft and our customers.

The development of customized applications for Microsoft Surface has grown to become one of our core businesses in 2009. With the end of the year now in sight, we’re beginning to see the results of some of our ongoing projects.

Over the past several months we have been working together with tisch13 and our client Constructa-Neff Vertriebs-GmbH, also known as “Neff”, in order to integrate Microsoft Surface in its POS and POI operations. The first product in this long-term partnership, an application titled “Neff Interactive”, was released in Bad Oeynhausen, Germany, during the “Küchenmeile A30” event last month. Enhancing energy efficiency is one of Neff’s primary concerns. The goal of this first application is to increase customer awareness for the company’s energy-saving technologies.

“Neff Interactive” consists of a puzzle game and a series of themes that allow potential customers to interactively explore the technologies behind the company’s products. Our Twist Guide navigation technology (which was first demonstrated earlier this year at Audi’s centennial celebration event) is also featured in this application.

Check out the video below to see “Neff Interactive” in action and stay tuned to find out about other Microsoft Surface projects in the upcoming weeks.

Our latest Microsoft Surface application, developed in cooperation with tisch13 GmbH, was presented this week at the “100 Jahre Audi” (100 Years of Audi) Night in Munich. Guests of the anniversary event were given the chance to interactively explore the history of the company on a Microsoft Surface unit with an innovative “twist button” feature. Thanks to its appealing design and user-friendly interface, the application attracted great interest during the event.

Check out our video below to see it in action.

The clipping behavior of the rendering system is probably one of the most confusing and least understood parts of WPF. Even experienced programmers sometimes rely on a trial-and-error approach for achieving the desired visual layout. Actually the clipping mechanism becomes much more clear once you understand the inner workings of it.

The three inputs that are used to determine the clipping geometry of an element are the UIElement´s ClipToBounds, Clip properties, and the UIElement´s protected visual GetLayoutClip method. These three inputs are combined by the layout system to create a final clipping Geometry object. This output is then assigned to the VisualClip property of the Visual class, which is used by the rendering system for the actual clipping.

How these three inputs get merged is the important part of the whole story.

The two figures below show the implementation logic of the GetLayoutClip method by the UIElement and the derived FrameworkElement classes. Note that finalSize in these figures is the size of the finalRect argument passed to the ArrangeOverride method.

As you see, the ClipToBounds property is used internally by the GetLayoutClip method.

So, once you understand the logic of the GetLayoutClip method, the rest is simple. The layout system first calls the GetLayoutClip method of the element and then calculates the intersection of the returned Geometry object and, if set, the value of the Clip property. And that intersection region is our final clipping geometry assigned to the VisualClip property.

One final point is the Canvas panel. Unlike other panel types in WPF, Canvas do not clip its children unless you set the value of the ClipToBounds property to true. The logic for this behavior lies again in the overriden implementation of the GetLayoutClip method. The figure below shows how the Canvas class implements GetLayoutClip.

The MSDN documentation greatly lacks the important details of the clipping mechanism. I hope this article can help you to better understand the whole picture.