Since the grandmother in-law is unable to live by herself anymore she has been staying with us since March.  Unfortunately our townhouse was not the best place for her to stay especially with her in-ability to go up stairs.  This required that she basically stay in a 360 sqft room and couldn’t move about the house. her bed and TV were in the same room.  This room was also unfortunately right off the front door so people coming and going would intrude on her while she was sleeping or just hanging around.

To help with this and allow her to be more comfortable, she purchased a house we could all live in after she sold her old house.  Unfortunately this also means I had to give up Verizon’s FiOS service and switch back to Comcast/Xfinity.  I honestly didn’t realize how much Comcast sucked until we got FiOS service and have had to give that up.

Comcast/Xfinity service is ok, but could be better.  I purchased the 105/10 internet connection. While it’s fast the start-up speed for downloads and just the overall speed and response times are somewhat slower compared to the Verizon 30/20 that I was paying for.

Comcast/Xfinity HD channels are horrible. The quality is worse compared to Verizons FiOS. Also Comcast has fewer HD channels compared to FiOS. With FiOS there were a whole slew of HBO HD, Cinimax HD, and Starz HD channels. Unfortunately on Comcast there appears to be about 1 HD channel per major movie channel.

The last thing to compare against is the cable boxes. The UI for the cable boxes Comcast uses is horrible. They pretty much just suck. I never would have thought that I would have cared, but after using the Verizon cable boxes the UI is 100% better with FiOS compared to Comcast.

I think I will have to take a serious look into Direct TV.

So I’m learning to program a GUI with WPF and most of the examples that I have seen don’t include alot of real navigation unless you are using a Page and treating it more like a browser page.  However I have been trying to use “Windows” with “Grid” containers to do Navigation similar to how Windows Media Center does it’s navigation.  Since I’m still learning WPF  I don’t know all the ins and outs yet. However, I did find this little tidbit.

If I have a main Window with a grid container I can clear the contents of the container and load it with the contents of another xaml file as a child.  However, what I found was that I could not reload the original window contents without very well. One of the primary reasons is that I need to detach the new window and then close it. I can detach the window by assigning the Content to null. Then I would call the .Close() method to close it out. If I do not do this, when I terminate the application it leaves the GUI thread hanging and doesn’t actually close out the process.

Here is the sample code:

AdminWindow myAdmin = new AdminWindow();
 object content = myAdmin.Content;
 myAdmin.Content = null;
 myAdmin.Close();
 _Grid.Children.Clear();
 _Grid.Children.Add(content as UIElement);

Hopefully that makes sense to everyone. I’m still working on my writing and trying to get information out.