It’s said that a true expert mostly knows how much he doesn’t know.  By that criteria, at least, I could certainly be called an expert!

Take WPF.  As things turn out, I’m a pretty dab hand at WPF and XAML.  Regardless, I’m not so dab at the ins and outs of rendering and transforms.  Now on most days, this isn’t a big problem.  I can generally hack together something useable, or even better, I can find exactly what I want on the web.  After all, as any modern programmer can tell you, there’s a ton of wonderful code out there; ripe and ready for the use.

Unfortunately, a bunch of that code tends to be just a tad “off;” exactly what you want, excepting a couple of critical details  Take my latest project.  I’ve been playing around with Tumblr tag parsing (don’t ask me just yet why!)  Along the way, I came across the wonderful Java-based Wordle and the similarly wonderful WordCloud for Silverlight.  One problem, though.  I ran into a bunch of conversion errors when I tried to convert the Silverlight code to WPF, and it looked like a bigger job than I’d want to handle on my own. Continue reading →