December 2009 - Posts
Just watched Gary Flake’s PDC09 session about Pivot. (yes, I went to PDC, but I spent most of my time talking with attendees and preparing for my talk).
Fascinating problem space and app! (Happy to see it built in WPF, too…)
Explore more information about Pivot at http://www.getpivot.com/
[see: PDC09 Video list]
I was never a Win32 developer, so I don’t know a ton about the .rc format…but this was an interesting comment that I found on Pete Brown’s “WPF and Silverlight Convergence” post from Philip the Duck:
@Steven: "I personally feel that Microsoft has revolutionized the way user interfaces are developed."
I absolutely love the way XAML comes full-circle (conceptually) back to the old "resource file" model (an RC file compiled to RES and linked into the EXE) first used in Windows 1.x, which provided a scalable UI model for dialogs ("dialog units" rather than pixels) and separated the UI ("view") from the code ("controller"). This resource model was introduced way back in the Win16/DOS 3.1 days of yore (1985-ish) but it's still used today in Win32/64 C++ native application development.
Sadly, VB and later WinForms completely bypassed the resource file model, resulting in hard-coded, non-scalable non-customisable UIs, so it warmed the cockles to see the concept brought back via XAML in WPF back in 2001 and now in Silverlight.
Of course XAML is a modern XML format and beyond comparison to the old text-based RC file format in terms of funtionality, but the few of us old DOS/Win16 farts still around, who cut our teath on the 1st Edition of Petzold's Programming Windows, smile at the similarity. RC resource files are dead - long live XAML resource files!
Happy to read Soma’s highlight of the improvements to extensibility for VS2010 including:
WPF is now a first class citizen within our extension templates. Right away, you can be up and running with a WPF tool window. Likewise it is easy to use XAML to design and add a custom piece of UI to the Visual Studio Editor. Extending the Editor has gotten significantly simpler and more robust. Previously, trying to do something as simple as getting the caret position took several lines of ugly interop code. With the new editor APIs you can do it in one line, without a trace of interop.
On top of that, I was excited to see that OPC plays a part as well:
Deploying your extension is no longer rocket science. There's no need to build an MSI to share your extensions. The extension project templates all generate a VSIX file. VSIX is our new deployment unit that leverages the Open Packaging Convention zip format and takes advantage of xcopy deployment of your extensions.
Check out that and more at: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/12/09/creating-extensions-for-vs-2010.aspx
@ruiespinho sorry #Microsoft but #VS2010 beta sucks. crashing and busy 70% of the time… i’m so disappointed
3 minutes earlier:
@geekoo and the new @microsoft #vs2010 is brilliantly fast… I’m loving it. :)
This is why we do betas…we’ll work with @ruiespinho…
I’m curious if anybody has a C or C++ based XAML parser yet? (recall that we’ve published [MS-XAML] “Microsoft Specification – XAML Object Mapping Rules”)
Somebody is wondering about parsing XAML on a server that isn’t running .NET…
Now that the PDC is over, I’m staying very busy helping to move XAML in .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 forward. Wanted to take a quick second to point towards a few good questions and answers about Silverlight and WPF.
With the recently released Silverlight 3 and the recently previewed Silverlight 4, Silverlight continues to make great progress catching up to many of the capabilities in WPF. There are also several things in Silverlight that WPF doesn’t do yet, or doesn’t do as well (DeepZoom, Media, etc…).
As such, some people in the community are concerned about choosing Silverlight or WPF. (A recent discussion on the WPF Disciples group is an interesting read; make sure to read Jaime Rodriguez’s take – message fifty-something) What you choose for now will depend on your application needs…we plan to meet your needs for great cross platform apps and great Windows apps.
Pete Brown does a good job of describing the future of Silverlight and WPF in his recent post: “The Future of Client App Dev : WPF and Silverlight Convergence”
As I mentioned recently, XAML UI continues to make strong progress on both fronts (Silverlight + WPF). Personally, I believe there will be more Silverlight developers than WPF, just like there were more ASP.NET developers than WinForms developers. This primarily is because their is a larger market for reach-web apps, than rich client apps. Both have their place. The more we can “converge” WPF + Silverlight into 1 thing, the better it will be for all.