May 1st, 2008

Microsoft releases Expression Studio 2

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:18 pm

Categories: Expression Studio, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Corp., Corporate Communications, Scripting Languages, Marketing, Software/Web Development, Web Development, Ryan Stewart

Microsoft has released the next version of its Expression Studio, their set of design tool for building applications on the web, which includes Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media, and Expression Encoder. Most of the RIA designers and developers I talk to have been using the beat of Expression Studio 2 for a long time largely because of the Silverlight support in Expression Blend 2.

Expression Studio was released about a year and a half ago as a partial answer to Adobe’s Creative Suite. In addition to Microsoft’s developer push towards RIAs (including Silverlight, ASP.NET Ajax, and WPF) they needed creative tools to enable designers to build on their platform and Expression Studio was born. It’s largely targeted at web technologies so it doesn’t have quite the reach of Adobe’s design tools but each tool in Expression Studio fills a need for Microsoft’s platform. Expression Web supports HTML/Ajax design, Expression Design and Expression Blend support XAML, Microsoft’s declarative graphic language, while Expression Media and Encoder are targeted at creating and managing Windows Media content. Some of the other notable features in the products include PHP and Adobe Photoshop import in Expression Web, support for RAW and the ability to geotag in Expression Media 2 and the addition of Expression Encoder 2 as a separate product as part of the suite.

In general, I think the biggest part of the release is Expression Web. I’m a big fan of the Blend product line but if you’re looking to build Silverlight 2 applicaitions, Blend 2 won’t help you as it only targets Silverlight 1 content. I’m also happy to see Expression Encoder be fully added to the suite. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Encoder and it makes it really easy to publish content right to the Silverlight Streaming service. In general I think more video is always good and Encoder looks like a solid product.

I am curious what they’ll do with Blend 2.5 which allows you create content for Silverlight 2. It’s currently in public preview mode and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it added as an update later on to Expression Studio 2. I’m not sure if the other Expression Studio products have 2.5 versions.

March 5th, 2008

MIX08 keynote rundown

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:18 pm

Categories: Expression Studio, Microsoft, Online Video, Ooyala, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Corp., Silverlight Penetration, Productivity, Business Structures, Advertising & Promotion, AJAX, Finance, Marketing, Internet

I was at the Microsoft MIX08 keynote today and Microsoft unveiled a few really cool things and a few not so much things. Obviously I work for Adobe so all the standard disclaimers apply.

First things first, lots of new bits. They dropped versions of Silverlight 2 Beta, Internet Explorer 8, Expression Studio 2 Beta and hooks for Silverlight and Visual Studio. Silverlight penetration is coming along at a rate of 1.5 million downloads a day and growing. That should get them to their number of 200 million downloads by June of this year. Flash has about 12 million downloads a day for comparison but I think that’s a very good number for Microsoft. No big news but some fun stuff to play with. Now on to the announcements.

A lot of the demos were things that we’d seen or heard of before like the Olympics site in Silverlight but there were a few gems that I think flew under the radar of some people. One is the adaptive streaming bit with Silverlight. In my opinion that was one of the coolest features of the day. I know that the Ooyala team has something like it in their video player. Adaptive streaming lets you provide the best experience to the user based on their system. If the bandwidth is slow and/or the machine isn’t up to speed, the stream automatically adjusts the experience so the user gets the highest watchable quality possible. This was one of the things that has made Move Networks so successful. That was the biggest surprise for me - the announcement of a partnership with Move and Microsoft around Silverlight. I don’t have any details of what the partnership looks like but that could be a big deal.

The coolest demo of the day was a deep zooming feature that was used on the Hard Rock Site. Microsoft has features in their tools that will let you stitch together a bunch of images and then a component that displays them so you can use the mouse wheel to get insane levels of detail on the stitched-together image. Pretty neat stuff. The rest of the demos were kind of blah. The AOL Mail application was good looking after they switched the skin to the Halo version but they showed things like “sorting a grid control” which is doable in Ajax. Even as a big Flash guy I wasn’t sure that using Silverlight on that application was a great showcase of the technology. They did do a fun/cool demo of WPF and Cirque Du Soleil

The other big news was the fact that Silverlight mobile will be released on Nokia devices. The showed a couple of demos (one good, one bad) of Silverlight applications running on a S60 device. It sounds really cool and the way I understood it you could take the same Silverlight code and run it on the phone or browser. Two big questions were when will it be available and what is the licensing model. It seems like Microsoft is trying to get Silverlight mobile deployed in a number of places so I would imagine they’ll make licensing as easy as possible.

Overall the keynote was good but not spectacular. Ray Ozzie talked a lot about “meshes” and how the ecosystem fits together. There were some very cool technical things with Silverlight but not a lot of examples to differentiate it with Flash. I was also hoping to see more about the workflow. At this point you can pretty much do anything you want to with Flash or Silverlight so what matters most in my mind is the tools. Blend got a few mentions but they were small bits and I would have liked to know more about their designer/developer story. They did show a “dev-igner” slide so that was cool. Maybe I need to go to the sessions to learn more.

Overall, even as an Adobe employee, I was hoping to see them push the boundaries and provide a ‘check’ to Adobe in the chess game. There was some of it, like the Silverlight mobile bit and adaptive streaming, but I was hoping for more tool innovation and more info about Silverlight 2 that we hadn’t heard about. But the crowd was energetic and it’s clear there’s a ton of RIA interest in the .NET world so we should see some great apps down the road.

March 3rd, 2008

Offline Silverlight: No current plans but eventually (And some Expression Blend news)

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:42 pm

Categories: Expression Studio, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Ryan Stewart

Martin LaMonica over at CNet talked with John Case, a general manager in Microsoft’s developer division about the possibility of an offline version of Silverlight. Case’s response was that there aren’t any current plans but he left the door open for something down the road:

“It’s something that we will want to do,” Case said in an interview on Monday. “Eventually, customers will expect us to do it.”

So you can wipe that off of your MIX08 predictions list, but it will still be a great show. Scott Guthrie posted another crazy-awesome long post about using Expression Blend with Silverlight. Microsoft will be shipping the beta a new version (2.5) of the Expression suite that I’m excited to dig in with. I’m a huge fan of Blend so even as an Adobe employee I’m pretty stoked to see how they’ve updated it for Silverlight 2.

February 20th, 2008

The importance of tools in rich Internet application platforms

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:01 pm

Categories: Adobe, Ajax, Curl, Eclipse, Expression Studio, JavaFX, Microsoft, OpenLaszlo, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Rich Internet Application, Microsoft Corp., Tool, Development Platform, Tooling, Productivity, Ryan Stewart

The RIA space is white hot. Microsoft, Adobe, the vast number of Ajax frameworks out there and companies like Laszlo Systems, Curl, and Appcelerator are all focused on creating great platforms and applications for rich Internet applications. We might even see JavaFX this year. Back when I did my predictions for this year I said that some of these smaller RIA players would have less than stellar years this year. I stand by that but I wanted to flesh it out a little bit because I think the main reason is tools. And all of these companies can adjust/enhance their offerings by changing the tooling strategy.

Tools are a big part of any job but they aren’t everything. A great carpenter with great tools will create a great piece of furniture. A great carpenter without great tools will probably still build something amazing. But a good carpenter with great tools can transcend his or her ability in some ways to create something very special. Development platforms are no different. The better your tools are the easier it will be for more people to create great things on top of your platform. The only problem in today’s RIA landscape is that there are really only two companies with great tooling stories. Not coincidentally, they’re also the biggest players: Adobe and Microsoft.

The tooling is also one of the big reasons that the rivalry between Adobe and Microsoft is so interesting. To paint a broad brush, Adobe has great design tools and Microsoft has great developer tools. Adobe has made a lot of inroads with Flex Builder and because we based it on a pretty good existing toolset,we got some instant credibility in the developer space. Microsoft made a big splash when they rolled out their Expression Suite as a competitor to Adobe’s design tools. One of the unique things about rich Internet application platforms is that you need both great design tools as well as great developer tools. That’s one area where smaller companies are going to struggle. Microsoft and Adobe both have the resources and the know how around tools which they can build on as they cross over into each others territory.

So what’s the solution and what’s my prediction? First, I realize I say this with a lot of bias, but that’s not the intent. If I were smaller companies I would build off of the bigger companies tools. I started thinking about this when Coté and I were on the podcast talking about JavaFx possibly hooking into Adobe’s design tools. If other RIA companies can take advantage of the Microsoft/Adobe toolchain, then they don’t have to worry about building from scratch (hard). They can simply plugin to the existing market and focus on the interoperability between those tools and their own platforms. In the Ajax world, which still hasn’t quite nailed the tooling yet, this could be a huge differentiator.

There are still risks. Microsoft and Adobe are obviously looking to make their tools play best with their platforms so being an addon is kind of a tricky situation. But I think the importance that everyone has started to place on experience means that both the design and development tools are going to be a very key part of the story. How those tools evolve, and especially in the realm between designer and developer, will be a important subplot to the adoption of RIAs.

January 10th, 2008

Rich Internet application predictions for 2008

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:31 pm

Categories: AIR, Adobe, Ajax, Apple, BuzzWord, Curl, Devigner Workflow, Expression Studio, Flash, Flex, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Online Video, OpenLaszlo, Rich Enterprise Applications, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Google Inc., AJAX, Microsoft Silverlight, Rich Internet Application, Apple Inc., AIR, Ryan Stewart

2007 was a great year for rich Internet applications. The combination of Microsoft and Adobe in the space took it to the next level. More bloggers started talking about it and the definition of what an RIA even started to expand with things like AIR and Prism bringing RIAs to the desktop. We also saw a lot of traction in the enterprise space with companies like Oracle and SAP looking to augment their user experience with rich Internet applications. 2008 is going to be even better and here’s why (hopefully I’ll do better than my 2007 predictions):

1. Silverlight will get to 200 million installs by the end of June, but it won’t be for 2.0. The stated penetration goal of Silverlight is to get 200 million installs by June. I think they’ll hit that number. Partnerships like Netflix, the Olympics and Jackass are great moves and will push them over the edge. On the downside I think you’ll see a 60-40 split on those installs with 60% of them being the better Silverlight 2.0 runtime and the other 40% being stuck in 1.0 land.

2. AIR changes how people think of the web. Big claim, and obviously as an Adobe evangelist I’m biased, but I love AIR. The 1.0 release of AIR will be cool, people are already starting to check it out and I think people are thinking differently about how to create applications. But I’m most excited about two things on the AIR platform; Linux and version 2.0. If 2008 will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop then AIR is going to help. With a 2.0 release of AIR (I doubt this will be before the end of the year) we should start having things like being able to leverage native code and access devices. Those are going to take the platform to the next level.

3. The browser rides tall with the help of plugins. I talk a lot about the desktop but the browser world continues to innovate. Silverlight and Flash Player in a heated competition is only going to move that forward. We’ll release Flex 3 this year and Silverlight 2.0 should ship this year which means browsers everywhere have the runtimes and programming models people need to create great rich Internet applications. I think this is the year we see browser vendors (even Mozilla) work closely with the creator of runtimes to take advantage of the new features so they can focus on making browsers faster and more stable instead of full of new features.

4. Collaboration becomes a big battle in the RIA space. The battle for creating the best collaboration experience is going to be fought by a number of big companies including Google, Microsoft, Adobe and a number of smaller but important players like Zoho. Web workers are going to be more important this year and they want solutions that help them work. We’re seeing some of that with Google Docs and Spreadsheets, we’ve got Adobe Connect as well as Share and Buzzword and Microsoft’s Office Live. That’s a great first step but this year companies are going to focus more on audio, video, real time data, exchanging smart documents and data visualization. That will help drive both adoption of RIA technologies and the features of RIA platforms.

5. Ajax gets closer to the rich Internet application platforms. I think a lot of people in the Ajax community didn’t see the value of incorporating things like Flash or Silverlight into their applications other than for a small video or for charts. Towards the end of this year I think that attitude changed. RIA companies are going to make it easier for Ajax developers to take bits and pieces of their platforms and Ajax developers are going to respond. We’ll see a lot more “hybrid-RIAs” where developers use a combination of technologies. That will be another reason for the browser vendors to play nicely with plugins.

6. The designer/developer workflow gets a quality overhaul. Helping designers and developers work together on the same project is a hard problem. But this year we’ll make big strides. The interactive designer community will get involved and help hash out some of the biggest problems. Thermo will be a huge step forward and will push Microsoft to do more with Blend. We won’t be perfect by the end but we’ll be engaging new communities and we’ll have a lot of material to draw from to help really solve the problem in 2009.

7. The days of smaller RIA technologies are numbered. I hate to say it but I think technologies like OpenLaszlo and Curl will continue to gain traction in some niches but won’t see widespread adoption. Those companies will still bring revenue but Microsoft and Adobe are pushing too hard and putting too many features into their runtimes for the smaller companies to keep up.

8. Apple makes a land grab for rich Internet applications but no one realizes it. This may have already happened but by the end of the year people will be talking about Apple’s RIA strategy. They’ve got Safari/WebKit, they’ve got the iPhone and they’ve set the bar when it comes to experience. They don’t have as many developers but that’s starting to change so the only thing they need is an RIA tool that competes with Flash. I think that tool has to be coming this year and when it does people will start to talk about Apple and RIAs. They already have a great platform they just need to let people create on top of it.

9. Real time data becomes an important selling point for RIAs. I really hope this is the year of real time. I mentioned the collaboration angle above but I also think that the entire web is going to move in a more real time direction. Instead of sites that use the polling method to get data we’ll see them start to use messaging to send data to the clients. This will have an impact on social networking, gaming, collaboration, finance, and every Web 2.0 startup. It’s going to be a competitive advantage by the end of the year and if you don’t have it you’ll be out of luck. We’ve got BlazeDS an open source project that enables some of that functionality, LiveCycle DS, our big suite and Microsoft has Windows Communication Foundation which is one of the top selling O’Reilly books of last year. We’re close.

10. There will be a fight for HD video on the web. Online video exploded last year and with the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD fight looking like there will be a winner people will turn towards the next generation of distributing media - the web. The web won’t overtake those mediums overnight but the groundwork will be laid this year. I think penetration and runtime quality will be big factors as people want flexibility in how they consume media. Both Adobe and Microsoft will make an HD push with their runtimes as consumer demand goes up. You’ll also see these technologies more easily incorporated downloaded files so they won’t be used only online. Both have been able to do that for a while but recently with AMP we’ve seen more focus in that direction.

11. (Bonus!) Google. I have no clue what Google will do. They’re going to be under more pressure to incorporate some aspects of RIAs such as richer collaboration, real time data and multimedia experiences. Do they push HTML 5 harder? Do they partner with Adobe or Microsoft? Apple? Google Gears will continue to get traction but I don’t think we’ll see widespread adoption even when they finally incorporate it into GMail. They’ve also got the Google Desktop which could play in their strategy at some point. Google is a big question mark for me.

October 8th, 2007

Interactive design: the next step for the CSS guru?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:46 pm

Categories: Experience, Expression Studio, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Web, Rich Internet Application, Designer, CSS, Scripting Languages, Software/Web Development, Web Development, Ryan Stewart

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how “traditional” web roles fit into rich Internet applications. One of the things that make browser-based web applications and RIAs so great is that the very nature of the web lends itself to being a jack of all trades. As a result, anyone can jump in and build pretty much anything. As the applications have gotten more sophisticated however, a division of labor has occurred and we see specialization for designers and developers. But what about the interactive designer? The interactive designer is kind of a cross between developer and designer. They’ve got to understand how things should be laid out from an aesthetic point of view but also understand how the application is supposed to flow and move between states. They shouldn’t be doing back end coding, but I think most interactive designers will be expected to be familiar with code and understand the development behind the UI. Tools like Thermo and Blend cater to the interactive designer, but in the RIA world there is a huge lack of interaction design talent. So where are we going to get it? I think CSS experts are going to fill the void.

I can remember spending a ton of time on sites like CSS Zen garden. The designs they created were great and it wasn’t until I took the HTML/CSS and tried to create my own that I realized how difficult it is to create good-looking CSS. You have to know the CSS tricks, be able to hand code (and essentially debug) HTML and CSS. But you also have to have an eye for how it all fits together. CSS has been great for the web and it’s been a popular outlet for technically-minded designers who want to move their inspiration online. These people are the perfect fit for the interactive designer mold in RIAs. They’ve got a great design sense but also have the skills to work in code and (most importantly) work within the UI constraints of the developer to create something awesome.

They’re used to working with web developers, so they understand the designer-developer issues better than most people. Give them tools like Thermo and Blend and I think they’ll really be able to grow into the role of creating applications as opposed to static pages. Undoubtedly part of the appeal of CSS is that it’s all based on web standards and many of the luminaries in the community are committed to that. But RIAs are becoming more open and more standards based, so I think interactive design is a natural next step for the CSS ninjas out there. They can focus on the challenges of user experience design instead of the challenges of different browsers rendering CSS incorrectly. They’ve got the knowledge, the design sense and the technical skills. Now the question is how do we encourage more of them to jump into RIAs.

April 23rd, 2007

The how and when of Adobe and Microsoft's Rich Internet Application technologies

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:45 am

Categories: Adobe, Ajax, Apollo, Expression Studio, Flash, Flex, Microsoft, On2, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation, XBAP

Tags: Desktop, Adobe Systems Inc., Application, Internet, Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, Macromedia Flash Player, Microsoft Windows, Internet Application, Video, Web Browser

Now that Silverlight is being talked about, people seem to be comparing Apollo and Silverlight in the same posts. I think this stems from the fact that both are still alpha/beta and that the two technologies "cross the streams" into the other companies territory. For that they are significant, but still not in competition. To help clear things up, I've tried to create a guide for how and when you would want to use different RIA technologies from Adobe and Microsoft. Hopefully this clears up a bit of confusion about which technologies are "competing" and which aren't.

I want to build rich desktop applications.

Adobe's Apollo lets you build cross-platform desktop applications using the exact same code base for all of your deployments. It uses a combination of Flash and Ajax so that you can take your web skills and deploy desktop apps. However it doesn't tie as closely to the operating system as other technologies. You can't access devices from Apollo and right now the plan is not to allow execution of native code. Think of Apollo as a way to deploy applications that require a bigger sandbox than the browser (things like file system access and native windowing), but not full operating system features.

To build desktop applications for Windows, you use the next version of .NET, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). You can do pretty much anything with WPF that you can do with other "desktop" technologies, but it will only run on Windows. It offers hardware acceleration, 3D support and the full Common Language Runtime (CLR) so .NET developers can dive in and build desktop applications.

I want to build rich browser-based applications.

Adobe's Flash Player is the method of choice to build browser applications. It runs as a plugin in the browser and compiles down to a binary 'SWF' file that can be embedded in HTML pages. Flex 2 is a framework for the Flash Player which makes building Flash applications more developer friendly. It makes it easy to do things like binding and custom components. With Flash Player 9, speed was much improved so that rich, advanced applications can be delivered cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux) in the browser.

Microsoft has a couple of different options. Siverlight *sort of* allows you to build browser based applications, but not NEARLY to the level that Flex does. Silverlight provides some rich media capabilities to JavaScript, but doesn't yet have the kind of support for developers that WPF or Flex does (this may change based on news at MIX). It does have some cross-platform support however, and runs for browsers on Windows and Mac. The other option for Microsoft is to create Windows Presentation Foundation applications and then deploy them as XAML Browser Applications (XBAPs). You're still limited to Windows but you can use your WPF code and deploy it in the browser (though it won't have all the rights and access privileges of a regular WPF application).

I want to make my web application more interactive.

Go grab a copy of Flash CS3 and go to town. Flash is the standard for creating interactive experiences, has a lot of designer support, and the Flash Player is installed on 95% of machines. Using things like the Flash JavaScript Integration Kit will help you bring Flash functionality to your Ajax application and add a bit of interactivity or richness where you need it.

This seems to be the sweet spot for Silverlight right now. Silverlight plays nicely with Ajax and lets you leverage JavaScript to add interactivity. Using JavaScript, you can transverse the DOM of a Silverlight asset by using named references in JavaScript (full DOM parsing may be on the way). That's helpful for applications using Ajax that just want to add some vector graphics or some multimedia to spruce up and add features.

I want to produce and consume video on the web.

Consuming Flash video is done with the Flash Player, which nearly everyone has. To produce Flash video, you can encode it with the Flash IDE, or stream it with Flash Media Server. You can also use On2 Flix to encode other file formats into Flash video.

Silverlight's big story last week was the video support; it uses the VC-1 codec which means you can get Windows media running as seamlessly as Flash video for Windows and Mac. To encode files for Silverlight you can use Microsoft's Expression Media Encoder or third party tools. To stream it, you can use software that ships with Windows Server 2003.

I want tools that allow me to create rich experiences.

Right now, nothing beats Creative Suite 3 from Adobe. With the integration between Macromedia's tools and Adobe's, the suite is top notch and it's something designers and creative types already know and love.

Microsoft came out with Expression Studio, which isn't quite a competitor to Creative Suite, but there are overlaps. Expression Web competes with Dreamweaver, and Expression Design kind of competes with Illustrator. Expression Blend is kind of a hybrid of Flash and Fireworks, but is billed specifically as an "Interactive Designer" and Adobe doesn't have a product that directly competes.

Hopefully that clears it up a bit, and shows how you can use RIA technologies from Microsoft and Adobe for a specific task depending on what you need to do and who you need to reach. If you think I missed anything, or have some thoughts, let me know.

April 3rd, 2007

Expression Blend and Expression Web will be available to MSDN premium subscribers

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:14 am

Categories: Expression Studio, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications

Tags:

Microsoft announced today that two programs from Expression Studio, Web and Blend, will be available to MSDN premium subscribers. Originally, Microsoft had decided not to include any Expression products with MSDN because they felt that the design-focused Expression tools didn't belong in the developer program.

Luckily, Microsoft listened to their customers, and they got a lot of feedback about the decision, so they decided to include the two most developer centric items, Web and Blend, into the premium program. I thought it was a very odd decision not to include Expression tools right off the bat, especially because Microsoft is trying to break into the designer market. The more design focused tools (Expression Designer and Expression Media) still won't be included, but Web and Blend both offer something for developers and go a long way towards linking designers and developers together.

The entire Expression Studio retails for $599 while Expression Blend is available for $499 standalone and Expression Web is $299 standalone. I think those price points are fine, but I do think that by rewarding the people willing to pay for an MSDN premium subscription, you'll generate some buzz and get people using the products more quickly. Good move by Microsoft. Forest Key and Soma, both from Microsoft, have more information. May Jo here at ZDNet also weighs in.

March 14th, 2007

Microsoft Expression Blend release candidate now available

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:03 am

Categories: Expression Studio, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, WFP/E, Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere

Tags:

This almost slipped off of my radar as I was checking feeds today, but according to the Expression Blog, Microsoft rolled out the release candidate version of Blend tonight. Blend is an interactive designer for creating XAML-based applications and is part of Microsoft's Expression Studio.

I haven't heard any talk of a release date for Blend, but I have to assume that it's coming at MIX conference, especially with the release candidate tonight. Dan Agonistes who is attending the MVP Summit had some information on WPF, WPF/E and Expression Studio that implied a release date of "spring or early summer". With two of the other Expression products out, I just can't see them not releasing Blend at MIX07, but stranger things have happened. His blog also mentions a "WPF/E" 1.0 release of this summer. I was hoping we would see that at MIX as well, but in his session that didn't seem to be the case.

I don’t see any release notes to know what's changed, but as soon as I find them I'll update the post, but right now I'm off to bed.

March 5th, 2007

Tool for creating "WPF/E" apps on the horizon?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:45 pm

Categories: Devigner Workflow, Expression Studio, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, WFP/E, Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere

Tags:

I always feel a odd bringing up shortcomings for products that are still very much in development like Apollo or "WPF/E", but one of the complaints I've heard about WPF/E is the lack of a specific tool targeted at the XAML that WPF/E uses. Blend is a great tool for designing full WPF applications, but trying to port those applications gives mixed results. The export to WPF/E XAML hasn't worked well enough for the developers I talk to.

But the guys over at the excellent revolUXions show dropped a bit of a hint about what might be coming for Blend and WPF/E:

We are postponing our WPF/E episode, as we're waiting for certain tools for WPF/E to be released by Microsoft. However, don't be disappointed. We have some major stuff to cover regarding WPF/E that you will not find anywhere else. Trust me. :)

I'm almost afraid to hope, but ideally it would be great for FULL support for WPF/E in Blend. When Eric Zocher showed the "map" of tooling for Ajax, WPF/E, and WPF, there was a big hole for WPF/E between Expression Web and Expression Blend. Blend is the natural tool, so if they're adding special WPF/E extensions or allowing you to create WPF/E specific projects, that would be a big step forward and should help WPF/E adoption when it's released.