WPF, Silverlight and XAML
On blogs.WindowsClient.net, I saw a link to Andrej Tozon’s blog about the PhotoSuru install experience. Read his post. Try the install experience of PhotoSuru.
User experience is more than just the app runtime…it is the app lifecycle.
We're using VS 2008 with .Net 3.5 WPF and get: "Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. Error in markup file ..." The control is not listed, and the line number is wrong. Google linked to your "old" blog from 2006 where you noted a setting that would provide more info. This setting is now set by default -- but does not provide useful information. You may be interested, comments in the old blog are littered with links to ads and porn. The larger question is why is the development tool still not providing useful messages after over three years?
Anyone who wants to see what a great install experience can be should go take a look at how most MacOS apps are installed. From both a usability and technical point of view, it's light years better than what you typically see on windows. You simply drag and drop the app "bundle" from whatever form media you obtained it on to your Applications folder. Bam, you are done.
There aren't thousands of completing packaging tools. There aren't dozens of alternatives to the programs menu. Un-installation is simply dragging the app bundle to the trash. There is no 20-minute registry settings update.
Visual Studio is perhaps the most painful app to install. I don't understand why the whole thing isn't a simple matter of copying files from the CD to your hard drive. Why do thousands of registry setting have to be modified when you could just put all of the app's settings into a handful of simple XML files that could live in the app installation directory?