Beta 2 is finally here. Got it installed last night and of course one of the first things I wanted to play with is the WPF designer to see how far it had come along since Beta 1 and the Nov CTP tools for VS 2005.

Positives:

• The designer surface itself has come a long way and the snap lines, margin guides, and other adornments to help get elements positioned within the UI and visualize what underlying layout properties have been set looks really nice.
• There is a zoom control that makes it really easy to zoom in and out with smooth scaling to focus on the parts of the UI you are working on as a nice alternative to scrolling.
• They have a great little breadcrumb control at the bottom that lets you see where you are in the element hierarchy and even gives you a pop-up rendering of the other items in the hierarchy as you hover the mouse over them (see below).
• Picks up container locations such as grid cell when you drag and drop a control.
• The properties grid is fixed as far as being able to edit collection properties such as the RowDefinitions and ColumnDefinitions properties of a Grid.
• The XAML editor has improved IntelliSense with icons that help identify different constructs (namespaces, classes, etc when the IntelliSense list is up. The IntelliSense includes listing available namespaces with a clr-namespace construct for types in the project. Once the clr-namespace has been added, custom types show up in the IntelliSense tag list. Nice.
• Common WPF constructs (Window, Page, UserControl) are in the Add > menu from the project.
• Double click to hook up default event! Finally!

There are still a number of annoying aspects that I sure hope will be worked out by release.

Negatives:

• Designer load time: Still takes a really long time to load an empty form in the designer.
• Properties grid: No option to sort the properties alphabetical, so you still need to scroll around looking for what category the property you care about might be lurking in. Unfortunately no property search like Blend has.
• XAML Editor: Still does not add closing element tags when you create an open element tag. Very annoying productivity hit wen forced to bang out XAML by hand. Fills everything that is not inside an element tag with a cyan background. There does not appear to be any way to customize this.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with what I see. I think I can finally ditch using the Nov CTP in VS2005 for WPF development! I'll still be using a mix of this and Blend though.

Saturday, July 28, 2007 3:33:11 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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I gave a talk on Connecting Applications with WCF to the Space Coast .NET and Orlando .NET User Groups over the last two nights. Had great attendance and questions, thanks to all who attended.

If you want the key takeaway from the talk (other than the demos and mechanics of how to connect two applications with WCF and use different bindings and capabilities of WCF), here is the elevator pitch.

WCF is a remote communications technology based on SOAP messaging. It is interoperable, powerful, flexible, easy to maintain, and supercedes all the previous remoting technologies in the .NET space:

• .NET Remoting
• ASP.NET Web Services
• Enterprise Services (COM+ for .NET)
• MSMQ

Basically, if you are writing a new application or new portion of an application that needs to make remote calls, use WCF and forget all the above exist. WCF gives you a single API for doing remote communications that rolls up all the capabilities of the technologies listed above, allowing you to write your code with most of the details of the remote communications abstracted away. This allows you to change major aspects of your remote communications approach, such as wire level protocol, encoding, security mechanisms, reliability, etc. without touching your programmatic code - you just modify config file settings. If you need to switch from TCP sockets with binary encoding to HTTP SOAP XML messaging, it literally takes about 30 seconds of editing your config files to do so.

There are a few fringe cases such as interoperating with a legacy .NET Remoting app, or certain advanced features of MSMQ that you will not be able to do with WCF, but for 98% of the remote communications needs out there, WCF is the choice you should make.

If you want the slides and demos I presented, you can grab them here:

Slides     Demos

Friday, July 20, 2007 2:54:28 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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In my ClickOnce book, I talk about David Guyer's excellent tool for creating Bootstrapper manifests for a custom bootstrapper item for your ClickOnce deployed applications. The URL I gave in the book is no longer valid, the BMG has been moved to codeplex at the following address:

http://www.codeplex.com/bmg

Basically, this tool gives you a nice dialog driven interface on the XML manifest files that make it so you can just check a box in Visual Studio (the Publish tab of project properties, Prerequisites button) to select your custom installers to be included in the bootstrapper setup.exe that is generated by ClickOnce. 

Tuesday, July 17, 2007 12:34:41 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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