Diving into the world of XAML

I’ve made progress reading a long book on WPF and XAML, and creating a WPF application to process Word and Excel documents, with a form interface.

XAML is quite fascinating, and I love declarative languages; the end-goal is to move to WinUI 3 instead of WPF (WinUI being much more modern), but I’m starting out with the latter as it’s more familiar to me. They both use XAML.

I hope to post some small utility programs built in WPF on my GitHub page eventually.

Experimenting with HTML5 Canvas

Started playing with HTML5 Canvas to draw graphics in the browser – I used it a long time ago to make 3D charts using Three.js, now I’m just experimenting with its native 2D context for fun.

It reminds me a lot of when I used to make games in QBASIC, manually drawing each pixel or line for each frame of an animation or scene. Fun!

LM Studio for local AI

If you want to experiment with AI models locally, check out LM Studio. It lets you choose a model to download, and then you can run the LLM locally on your machine. Expect maxed out processors and RAM, and a longer runtime to respond than online AI clients, but it’s cool to run it on your own machine.