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• Introducing the Third Major Release of Windows Presentation Foundation

  Today I'm excited to announce the public beta availability of a major new release of WPF. Since we shipped .NET Framework 3.5 late last year, the team has been hard at work at a new release that adds many supplemental features, fixes a good number of bugs, offers many performance optimizations, and includes a new streamlined installer for a subset profile of the .NET Framework optimized for client scenarios. This new release will ship as part of .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 later this summer; the beta release is an early preview of these enhancements. In this blog post, I want to provide a broad overview of the new features in this release, focusing on WPF. Download links: Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Beta) .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (Beta) Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions SP1 (Beta) Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 (Beta) Deployment It's been interesting over the last year or two to see the balance between business and consumer applications developed using WPF. Our early expectation was that WPF would be used primarily for consumer software: the assumption was that animation, rich media, flow documents, 2D and 3D graphics etc. would be primarily of interest to those kinds of applications. In fact, it's been surprising how many enterprise applications have taken advantage of it: architectural patterns such as the data templating and binding model and the separation of UI from code have turned out to be even more compelling reasons to adopt WPF in many cases. Although Windows Vista includes WPF out of the box, we recognize the need to provide a lightweight way to deploy the platform to desktops running Windows XP. If you're distributing a consumer application over the Internet, it's key to have a setup package that downloads and installs quickly, while providing the user good feedback on its progress. We've put the .NET Framework on a diet, and we've now got a solution for those kinds of applications. As well as the full .NET Framework, we now have a Client Profile that weighs in at about 25MB (roughly the same size as Acrobat Reader), installs in a couple of minutes, and provides a customizable install experience. How did we reduce the size of the .NET Framework? We removed many assemblies that aren't typically used in client application scenarios (it would be an esoteric client application that needed ASP.NET to execute locally, for instance). The file list was selected over the past year... Posted May 12 2008, 09:00 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: WPF, windows, controls, Visual Studio, changes, cider

• Silverlight 1.0 - New Maintenance Release Available

  We released a minor maintenance update to Silverlight 1.0 over the weekend (internally known as GDR3 , where GDR stands for "General Distribution Release"). I'm sure most readers of this blog already have Silverlight 2 Beta 1 installed on their own machines, but if you're building a site for the tens of millions of users that already have Silverlight installed on their machine, you'll be pleased to know that we're continuing to service the 1.0 release to take account of customer-reported issues. The latest release is live now on the web for both Mac and PC ; it reports itself as 1.0.30401.0 (where the build number indicates that it was compiled on April 1st). The changes are minor in nature and shouldn't affect existing applications; they include an audio bug fix for nForce 4 motherboards , an update to support custom parameters in ASX playlists , fixes to font support on Mac OS X Leopard and improved multi-language support during installation and update. As ever, the way to check which version you're running is to right-click on some Silverlight content and choose the Silverlight Configuration context menu option; on a Macintosh, it's visible by browsing to the Silverlight run-time in its installation location in the browser Plug-Ins folder. Incidentally, it seems that most people don't realize that we publish release notes that highlight the deltas from one release to another (admittedly, the link is pretty buried, so it's worth adding to your favorites). Posted Apr 07 2008, 07:08 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: Silverlight, changes

• What does Windows Vista SP1 Mean for Developers?

  As many people will have noticed, we released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 this week ( read about the notable changes here ). Aside from the inevitable bug fixes and enhancements to support new hardware types, one of the underlying changes is that SP1 brings the Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 codebases together. This is a big deal, but it's surprising how few people have noted it: this is the first time we've ever had a common codebase for Windows that goes all the way from a budget consumer PC right up to a mainframe-class datacenter server. Internally to Microsoft, this makes it easier for us to provide sustained engineering on the product: if we want or need to update a system component, we only have to produce two binaries (x86 and x64) for all languages and product editions. Compare that to the days of Windows XP/2003, when we had maybe 25 different language editions and x86 and x64 variants for both client and server OS releases, and you can see how the testing matrix has become a lot simpler! Externally, the benefit is of course that simply by updating to SP1, you get the benefit of a kernel that has been through an extensive server-hardening process. ( Check out this Channel 9 video I recorded last year with Eric Hanson to get just a small flavor of the stress testing work that we do with every build.) Beyond the kernel and subsystem improvements, Windows Vista SP1 brings major improvements to IIS 7. Comparing the original Windows Vista "RTM" version against that shipped with SP1 is like comparing the basic and premium models of a car - the SP1 version of IIS contains all the features added to create the server-strength edition (with the caveat that Windows Vista SP1 is obviously not licensed for use as a commercial-scale production Internet web server). As a crude measure, compare the two screenshots of the administration console below - the left image is of Windows Vista RTM, the right is of SP1: You'll see other changes to Windows Vista that affect certain relatively niche groups of developers. Direct3D receives a minor update to 10.1 ; there are new APIs to control the Data Execution Protection and Kernel Patch Protection features; and there are new cryptographic and random number generation algorithms available for developer use. As ever, more information about these features can be found in the Windows SDK . As a .NET developer, you'll notice that Vista SP1 updates the installed .NET components to .NET Framework... Posted Mar 19 2008, 02:21 PM by Tim Sneath Filed under: WPF, windows, vista, version, changes