WPF/E - Febuary CTP & SDK Released!

Microsoft has released the latest WPF/E CTP. You can download the Windows version from here and the Mac version from here.

You may download the SDK from here. In addition, the online reference for the SDK may be found from here.

MSDN Forums - Achievement(s) Unlocked

Hello!

One of my goals for this blog and the community for 2007 was to be more active in the forums. At the end of the first month of 2007, I noticed that I managed to land in the top 10 on both the WPF and WPF/E forums! Keep the questions coming!




P.S. I believe they are getting ready to release the next WPF/E CTP. I tested viewing this post and the following error appeared. I'll put a post up when its out.

WPF/E - A basic WPF/E User Control

UPDATE - 05.05.2007 - The content of this post is no longer valid with the 1.0 beta release of Silverlight. The updated post and source code can be found here.

Recently, I wanted to learn about WPF/E so I created an ASP.NET User Control that takes the images from a specified directory and rotates through them and displays their reflection. I will admit, this posting is a bit light on pure information, however, I still wanted to share what I learned and the code I wrote. If you have any questions, please post a comment and I will be glad to answer them. (you can get the source code here):

I am not saying this is the best how-to on this type of thing, in fact, there are several improvements that can be made to the implementation. Rather, I created this as a proof-of-concept for myself, so I thought I would share what I learned along the way.

• I was pretty impressed with the ease in using this technology. If you are familiar with JavaScript, you are going to find it easy to work with WPF/E. A long time ago, I learned ActionScript. It's mediocre, but personally, I would rather work with a widely used language such as JavaScript when developing. I'm very thankful the WPF/E team decided to use JavaScript instead of trying to develop some other new scripting language.
• I really appreciated the fact that because WPF/E is in open text platform (it uses xml and JavaScript), the installation requirements fall on the client side. This was great because my hosting service doesn't have .NET 3.0 components installed, yet I was still able to deploy this sample.
• I actually used the Microsoft Expression Blend Beta 1 for the graphics implementation. I was extremely pleased to see that I had to make ZERO changes to the xaml in order to get it to work within WPF/E. Very slick.
• I had some difficulty deploying the application because the .xaml MIME type was not registered correctly on the hosting server. I do not own the server so I could not see what had happened. Shawn Wildermuth pointed out that sometimes you can have success deploying an application by using the .xml extension in place of .xaml. This is useful if you are having difficulty in getting .xaml registered as a mime-type. This little tip allowed me to get the WPF/E control you are seeing above deployed.

I plan on presenting on WPF/E in the Louisville, KY and Indiana geographies over the next couple of months. So if you're in the area and interested in this technology, please view the user group websites for more information.

once again, the source code is here if you would like it.

P.S. I just made the cut-off for my one-a-week posting goal by 27 minutes :)

WPF - What's the difference between XBAPs and WPF/E Applications?

I was recently trying to determine what the differences are between XBAPs and WPF/E applications. At first glance, they are both browser based solutions, so I was wondering about what the potential catch was. If you (the reader) have/know of any more please let me know and I will gladly update this posting. At this point, this is a list of some of the core items I've found:

• WPF/E Applications
  • Are cross-platform ready (Mac OS X and Windows)
  • Do not require the client to have the .NET 3.0 runtime. Instead, WPF/E applications run within a browser plugin.
  • Do not support code-behind
  • Rely on JavaScript


• XBAPs
  • Require the client to have the .NET 3.0 runtime components installed.
  • Are not cross-platform enabled. They will only run on Windows machines.
  • Support code-behind
  • Must run within IE (or use the IETab plugin for Firefox)

In my personal opinion, In general, I intend to use the technologies in the following environments:

WPF	XBAPs	WPF/E
Desktop solutions	Intranet Applications	Internet Applications
	Organization specific gadgets	General purpose gadgets

In general, WPF/E provides a more portable solution while currently sacrificing some of the functionality that XBAPs provide. In addition, XBAPs provide a slightly better developer experience simply because debugging JavaScript code can be somewhat tedious in comparison to debugging some code-behind pages.

How do you intend to use these technologies? I look forward to your comments.

Misc - Major Discovery!

According to the Superhero Personality Quiz I am Spider-Man!

Spider-Man 80% Superman 65% Hulk 60% Batman 50% Robin 50% The Flash 45% Green Lantern 45% Iron Man 45%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

I won't count this as my post per week :)

WPF - How to distinguish a Grid from a Table

Recently, while perusing the WPF reference documentation, I noticed that WPF provides both a Grid and a Table control. I was very interested in comparing and contrasting the two as initially, I believed the two were almost synonymous. However, neither control provides the complete functionality of the other. This posting will help you learn how to distinguish between a Grid and a Table. Alot of this information is available from the Grid definition page on MSDN.

A Grid provides the following features over the Table:

• Element can be inserted by row and column indexes.
• Content can be layered within a single cell.
• Children can be relatively positioned to an upper-left corner of a cell

A Table provides the following features over the Grid:

• Built-in support for paging
• Built-in support for table headers
• Built-in support for table footers.

Essentially, a Grid is used for Layout and a Table is used Data. If you know of other differences, please post them in the comments and I will be glad to update this post.

Cornucopia 2007

Happy New Year!

I wanted to set some expectations for this blog in the upcoming year as well as some of the goals I am shooting for.

• At least one post per week.
• Be more active in the WPF Forum
• If Visual Studio "Orcas" is released this year, I would like to present to "How-to" videos throuh this blog.
• Complete a useful XBAP component
• Create an entire site utilizing WPF/E

It's going to be a busy and exciting year!