Acropolis August CTP (VS 2008 Beta2 Refresh) Release available now

KathyKam — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 05:31:00 GMT

This release is mainly an update so that our customers can continue to evaluate “Acropolis” with the latest VS 2008 Beta. In addition to VS 2008 Beta2 support, we have also added one small feature named “FloatingLayoutPane”. We have gotten feedback from our customers and in our forum that basic functionality like showing a floating window is too hard in the July CTP. Please let us know what you think.

Please note, the Acropolis August CTP depends on VS 2008 Beta2, it will not work with VS 2008 Beta1.

Download the bits:

- Acropolis CTP & Documentation

- Acropolis Samples for August CTP

The links will also be posted on http://windowsclient.net/Acropolis soon. We look forward to your feedback.

Thanks,
The Acropolis Team

"Acropolis" July CTP available now [Kathy Kam]

KathyKam — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 23:47:00 GMT

The Acropolis team is pleased to announce that Acropolis July CTP release is now available for download at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=44977885-86B5-4AA0-9F20-DB365BFB9D10&displaylang=en

Features available in Acropolis July CTP includes:
- Transition Animation improvements – You can now add transition when changing page in TabLayoutPanes!
- Better Design Time support
- Better Custom Theming support
- Various bug fixing driven from community feedback

This release includes many fixes that the community has requested and we are looking forward for more feedback from all of you. Let me know what you think!

Let me go a little more indepth about each of the features:

- Transition Animation improvements

1) You can now add transition when changing page in TabLayoutPanes:

<Windows:TabLayoutPane Parts="{Binding Part.NavigationManager.ActiveParts}"> 
    <Windows:TabLayoutPane.Transition> 
        <WindowsTransitions:RotateTransition Contained="True"/> 
    </Windows:TabLayoutPane.Transition> 
</Windows:TabLayoutPane>

2) Also, you no longer need to specify transition in a PartPane by creating a "Transition" tag, instead you can do this:
What you have to do in CTP1:

<Windows:PartPane Name="RootPart">

<Windows:PartPane.Transition>

<WindowsTransitions:RotateTransition/>

</Windows:PartPane.Transition>

</Windows:PartPane>

What you can do in July CTP:

<Windows:PartPane Name="RootPart" Transition="RotateTransition"/>

- Better Design Time support

We did various improvements on our Design Time. For instance, you can now use the Application Designer to select your themes. (It used to be a combo box that doesn’t work).

- Better Custom Theming support

In CTP1, you can create a custom theme, but you’ll need to copy and paste some framework code to do so. For the July CTP, we have removed that need and the only thing you need to create your own custom theme is to register your theme and the XAML style overrides you’d want. I still need to do a post on how to do this. We also did various theming fix up that our customers reported.
- Various bug fixing driven from community feedback

Too many to list… J

Acropolis Team Blog : Releases

Acropolis August CTP (VS 2008 Beta2 Refresh) Release available now

"Acropolis" July CTP available now [Kathy Kam]