Live from TechEd Day 4 (More Acropolis)

This post is coming in the afternoon because I spent most of the morning playing around with the Acropolis release. It is a very early release: a lot of the templates and options that you would want to use are missing, so it is mostly an attempt to find out about the vision for the product. I also watched the introduction video that they have on the website. I recommend watching the video because it points out the places where more content will come in the future rather than trying to guess while using the program.

There are also two walkthroughs in the help file. I hadn't seen that mentioned so I didn't find the walkthroughs until after I had been playing around for a while. One of the walkthroughs goes through the same scenario as the introduction video. The other walkthrough is more interesting and it covers building a simple RSS reader. You will notice that while there is almost no code written for the notepad walkthrough, the RSS walkthrough has a substantial amount of code and XAML to write relative to the time you spend using the tools. I think that the RSS walkthrough is closer to a realistic example and it's better to use that sample if you want to get a feel for the developer experience. Writing notepad only gives you a feel for the installation process because all of the functionality is built into the product already.

I don't think that it takes that long to get a feel for the product because a lot of the features and polish are still to be added. The core tools are very simple, but you'll need to learn each of the application types, component parts, layouts, and themes once they are available. After about four hours, here are my initial impressions.

• I like the wizard approach for getting started but it has to be easy and robust to change my mind later and not lose the code I've already worked on.
• There is a lot of terminology and stuffy terms that get thrown in your face right when you start. It threw off my initial impression on usability to large extent.
• I like the model for command routing and handling. It matches the way I'd want to code but the infrastructure gets automatically generated.
• The separate designer application helps get the infrastructure crud out of my face when I don't want to see it.
• I hope the extensive use of XAML leads to a substantial wealth of tool support in the future. I'm weary of having to play with huge piles of angle brackets, whether it's XML config, XAML, or any other angle bracket dialect that is in style at the time. I just want tools to keep it out of my face. Acropolis uses XAML for the UI (and hopefully gets any WPF focused tools for free) and XAML for wiring together components. That is screaming for a solid and polished visual model designer rather than giving me notepad with nice text highlighting.
• So, how do I deeply integrate all of this with workflows for actually building my business applications?

Next time: Live from TechEd Day 5