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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

• Great Line-of-Business Controls for WPF

  I'm delighted to see that Infragistics have just released their NetAdvantage control set for WPF. It's a huge download: over 100MB, so either the controls are very big, the documentation is extremely verbose, or there are lots of samples included! This control set nicely fills the gaps in the capabilities currently provided by WPF, including a data grid, charting controls and an Office ribbon implementation that looks pixel-perfect to me. Complex controls like an Office ribbon clearly benefit hugely from XAML. The ability to declaratively create nested collections really makes what would otherwise be a painstaking and error-prone task really easy. In the case of Infragistics' ribbon, you just declare a XamRibbon element that contains a RibbonTabItem that contains a ButtonGroup that contains the constituent buttons. It's almost self-documenting, because it so closely parallels the actual visual structure of the ribbon. Adjusting the visual theme of the ribbon is as easy as any other WPF project - just merge in a new resource dictionary containing the changes you want to make. We've recently released a ribbon ourselves as part of an MFC feature pack for C++ developers, but the difference in complexity ably demonstrates why WPF is such a powerful platform for building heavy-duty UI. In the interest of fairness, I should also highlight some of the other great controls out there: Xceed have a great (free) data grid, ComponentOne also have a data grid and chart control, along with a bunch of calendaring components, DevComponents also have a very impressive Office ribbon and a Visual Studio-esque docking control, IdentityMine have a 3D carousel as part of their Blendables toolkit, and Actipro have yet another Office ribbon along with a wizard control. Shamelessly stolen from the Infragistics product manager's blog, here's a screenshot that shows off the kind of application you can build very quickly with this control set: Posted Jan 30 2008, 12:31 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: WPF, User Interface, XAML, mfc, controls