December 2nd, 2006

Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere info starting to trickle out

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:56 pm

Categories: .NET 3.0, Avalon, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere

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Update: It looks like the pages (and the blog post) have been taken down.

I'll have a lot more information on Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E) coming up on Monday, but it looks like David Boschman has some links on his blog. Including a link to the new WPF/E page on MSDN. (via John Dowdell).

It looks like the download is unavailable, but if you look at the Top Downloads section you'll see samples as well as downloads for both Windows and Mac. In addition, there is a lot of information on the WPF/E FAQ that Microsoft has up.

Now, as I said, I'll have a lot more analysis up Monday, but I think a lot of people are going to be very impressed by WPF/E. The WPF/E and Expression teams have put a lot of thinking into what an RIA web technology should be and this is going to allow for a great cross-browser experience and complete with Flash in a big way. In addition, developers are going to find it very easy to use the technology, so I can't wait until Monday to see what people think.

November 7th, 2006

The beginning of an era - Windows Presentation Foundation ships

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:13 pm

Categories: .NET 3.0, Avalon, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Windows Presentation Foundation

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The .NET Framework 3.0 has been released which means that Windows Presentation Foundation is now fully available as a development platform for Rich Internet Applications. The .NET Framework blog has a list of the various downloads.

If you use Vista when it comes out, the .NET Framework 3 will be installed by default, but the download is required for anyone using Windows XP. Reactions are all over the place including Rob Relyea's blog, DesignersLove.NET, Mike Swanson, and hackedbrain among others.

Big congratulations to the .NET and Avalon teams. It's been a long time coming, but hopefully it was worth it. With the release of WPF, my eyes are on Adobe's Apollo as the only Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology that isn't released yet. The RIA space is booming. We have Adobe's Flex, OpenLaszlo, and now we have WPF. I'm excited to see what developers do with the new Framework and how they leverage the power of WPF and XBAPs to build richer user experiences that go beyond the browser. The only question mark I have for the platform is when we will see WPF/e and what platforms will that be supported for.

September 1st, 2006

Windows Presentation Foundation Release Candidate 1 is in the wild

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:16 pm

Categories: .NET 3.0, Avalon, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Windows Presentation Foundation

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This actually caught me as a big surprise. For weeks I had been assuming that Vista would be pushed back even further and that we wouldn’t see a release candidate build for a long time. However tonight, according to the Windows Vista Team Blog, Windows Vista RC1 is complete and available for download by TechBeta or TAP participants.

More applicable to me, but right alongside the Vista release is the announcement of the .NET Framework 3.0 Release Candidate. This is available for anyone to download via the link above. The SDK is also up for download. I know this isn’t right on schedule, but I’m impressed that Microsoft brought everything together. Now they just need to get the tools closer to being ready.

March 27th, 2006

Flash, AJAX, WinFX and the importance of experience

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:21 pm

Categories: Adobe, Avalon, Experience, Flex, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, User Interface, WinFX

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There is a fascinating article in Newsweek that anyone who does anything with the web should read. It’s important because it talks to a different audience (the future users) and it comes at the topic without the hype with which so many things in the "web 2.0" space seem to come bundled with. The article outlines what a lot of us already know, that the "new" web is, in the end, all about empowering the users. It’s about allowing users to tag their content, connect with friends, share things and communicate in new ways. This is why the opportunity for Flash is so big.

AJAX is a great technology for building web applications. It’s fast, it’s standards-based and it makes ordinary looking web pages do cool things. But all of these AJAX applications still look like web pages, they just don’t act like it. As the space moves forward, people are going to demand more than just uber-functional web pages. They are going to want full-fledged applications. They are going to be drawn to the kind of warm, engaging transitions that Flex makes so easy.

The Web 2.0 space has, with some exceptions, been made up of the digerati. The basic consumer doesn’t care about RSS or tagging. But they do care about their data, and the fact that they don’t know about RSS or tagging doesn’t take away the value of those technologies. Flex allows developers to very easily create a "web experience" that people feel comfortable with and that is more "human" than current web applications. Windows Presentation Foundation does the same thing. Both Flex and WPF focus very heavily on the experience.

Right now, it’s difficult to show the benefit of that to people using AJAX because AJAX does everything it needs to for the current generation of RIAs. But in the next couple of years, as more and more normal users start using the web to store data, find friends and interact with data, it won’t be able to compete with WinFX and Flex because people will demand more from their web applications. If the "live web" is the internet of today, the "experiential web" will be the internet of tomorrow.