Browse by Tags

• new york times
• Orcas
• ria
• sample
• sdk
• windows
• WPF

• Have YOU Updated Your Windows SDK Recently?

  It can be pretty hard to keep everything up-to-date on a developer workstation these days. With so many CTP releases, betas, and service packs, I know I often realize that my own machine is behind in one area or another. One particularly worthwhile update that might have missed your attention over the last couple of weeks is a new release of the Windows SDK , focused on enhancements in the .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Vista SP1 and  Windows Server 2008. Amongst other changes, this updated SDK has new documentation that covers all the new classes in WPF 3.5 (e.g. UIElement3D, System.AddIn, LINQ-based data binding), a variety of new samples for common Windows services such as User Account Control, Windows Search, Windows Error Reporting, Speech, and a range of shell APIs. If you've not installed the Windows SDK before, another incentive is a ZIP file containing over 100MB of sample WPF code (check out %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Samples\WPFSamples.zip). After installing the Windows SDK, you'll want to do two things: Run the new Windows SDK Configuration Tool (Start / Programs / Windows SDK v6.1 / Visual Studio Registration) to ensure that this is set as the default help collection in Visual Studio Follow this workaround to fix a XAML Intellisense bug that will be very irritating if you're a WPF developer. For more information on the Windows SDK, check out the team's blog or visit the recently overhauled Windows Vista development center on MSDN. Posted Mar 10 2008, 11:15 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: WPF, Orcas, sample, windows, msdn, sdk

• We've Released the News Reader SDK!

  Many of you have seen the New York Times reader application - it was featured as part of the portfolio I've been building up of Great WPF Applications . As I mentioned at the time, the New York Times reader is based on an SDK that we built to allow newspapers and content publishers to create rich, "occasionally-connected" experiences based on the flow layout capabilities in WPF. We've had a private beta program running for a while now, and over the intervening months there have been a number of other newspapers that have gone live with applications using this toolkit. Now we're delighted to announce the public release of the reader toolkit on windowsclient.net . We've made a number of improvements to the kit to broaden its usage; the reader toolkit is now known by the rather more accurate but slightly less memorable name: the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit . This reflects its potential to go beyond a news reading scenario and handle other kinds of data synchronization and display needs. For example, you could use this as the basis of a client for financial data analysis, where the application downloaded stock prices and other financial information and presented it in a rich client experience ( Lab49 , are you listening?!) The great thing about the starter kit is that the source code is available, so you can customize it to your heart's content: changing templates and styles, modifying the way it handles data, adding new features, and so on. We've also created a sample MSDN Magazine reader application built with the starter kit, which is of course also provided with full source code . Even if you're not interested in the reader toolkit itself, you'll find this a really useful application in its own right. Have fun with this - I'm looking forward to seeing the applications people build with this toolkit... Posted Jan 16 2008, 10:58 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: WPF, sample, ria, msdn, new york times