March 2010 - Posts
Fun to see this kind of thing getting started!
Happy to see more great detail from the VS team about how they have used WPF and XAML in the building of VS2010.
Matthew writes in great detail about the windowing system with: “WPF in VS 2010 – Part 5: Window Management”. As part of that, he details that the Windows state data is saved to XAML. VS ended up writing what you could call a specialized implementation of XamlServices.Load() and .Save(). They did this work before .NET 4 beta2’s work in XamlSchemaContext subclassibility work.
If this work was to be redone, it would be an option to use XamlServices.Load() and .Save() with a custom XamlSchemaContext that would avoid reflection…similar to the way that our XamlReader.GetWpfSchemaContext() implements.
Other vocabularies
There are other formats (XAML Vocabularies) that .NET 4 or VS 2010 have introduced, which we’ll get into more detail over time: VS MEF Catalog, msbuild properties, window management location, WF, WCF, and of course WPF.
At PDC09, we discussed that our direction was to invest in improving the Silverlight XAML parser. We didn’t announce a timeframe, but I’m happy to see that this work successfully made it in time for Silverlight 4!
David Poll, the Program Manager for Silverlight runtime’s XAML parser, goes into the details of what is new and improved in “New in the Silverlight 4 RC: XAML Features”.
There is still a lot of great work to do in future Silverlight versions - but this is a great foundation to build on!
Developers often find some benefit by implementing an override for ToString(). I believe that we could make providing a DataTemplate in generic.xaml very beneficial as well. First we have to start a beneficial cycle…
What could be done with it:
- Apps that use that object in their UI, would have a default data template.
- Tools that help build UI could have a better default data template.
- Visualizers of generic object graphs (like debuggers) could have a better visual representation.
- more…
How to create a default DataTemplate for your type:
- Start with a WPF or Silverlight Control Library project
- Create the class in that project
- Modify themes\generic.xaml to contain a DataTemplate with DataType=”{x:Type l:MyType}”
- (Silverlight doesn’t yet support this…so perhaps you could give your DataTemplate a key of “defaultViewForMyType”)
Thoughts?
Would love to hear what you think…
Thanks to vocal feedback, we’ve realized that our text clarity improvements in VS 2010 Release Candidate could be improved upon again.
Chipalo gives you details in the WPF Text Blog’s: “Additional WPF Text Clarity Improvements”
I’m very happy to see this problem with smaller text sizes fixed!
Happy to see that we’ve finally released a few key facts on Windows Phone 7’s developer platform:
Mix10 in Las Vegas, March 15-17th will be digging deep into the details. I’m excited…XAML UI on the phone!
Yesterday I was in a meeting with the MultiPoint team here at Microsoft and I was very excited to hear that they helped release a new SKU for Windows Server called Windows MultiPoint Server 2010! See microsoft.com/windows/multipoint
My vision was having 2 keyboards and mice on 1 pc on a desk, and supporting the ability to have users use 2 different applications.
June 2007, I blogged:
I'd love to have 2 monitors, 2 mice and 2 keyboards on a pc to enable 2 users.
Unfortunately, Windows client has a bunch of ties to 1 app having focus, etc… MultiPoint Server gets around this by effectively using Remote Desktop sessions into the same computer. So you have 2 monitors, 2 keyboards, 2 mice and you are good to go. Sounds like you can do many more users than that, as well…
Interesting!
During WPF 4, the WPF team did a bunch of work with the Visual Studio team to ensure that VS (and thus all WPF apps) worked as well as possible over Remote Desktop.
Jossef Goldberg, a WPF Program Manager, has a great blog post that goes into great detail: “Optimizing Visual Studio 2010 and WPF applications for Remote Desktop”
[Other Terms: Terminal Services, TS, Remote Desktop Protocol, RDP]