The final version of VS2010 sp1 is now available for download Download Service Pack 1 (MSDN Subscribers) Thursday's general availability download is here . The description\features in the SP1 can be found at this LINK Share this post

Today we announced the plans for the next version of Silverlight along with a bunch a demos at the FireStarter event. If you missed it, you can take a look at the recordings The feature list for SL5 includes Media improvements Graphics Improvements Databinding updates Performance improvements Fluid UI capabilities Text improvements .... and much more Share this post

October 2010 update of WPF Ribbon (on codeplex) is now available for download . The updates include: · Ribbon Targets .NET 4.0 as well · Ribbon targeting 4.0 takes advantage of the ClearType in WPF · Ribbon now works in VS2010 Express editions · Stylistic fixes · Rendering fixes · … Share this post

One more interesting site: www.xamalot.com ... Was looking around for some interesting xaml artifacts for a sample project and this site had plenty of it. The clipart is pretty nice (as shown below)... Have fun.. \ Share this post

The other day when browsing through the blogosphere I came across Arik's posts describing the workarounds\tips that he used for porting his 3.5 WPF application to Silverlight. It was a good read since all these tips from different bloggers have been consolidated in 2 posts Porting from WPF to Silverlight: The Missing Pieces, Part 1 Porting from WPF to Silverlight: The Missing Pieces, Part 2 Share this post

The Ribbon Control is a pretty big control owing to the complexity of the Ribbon design guidelines. You can give it a try by downloading from LINK While there are several things to blog about, this post will focus on RibbonGallery. The download provides a sample that covers all features by implementing the Office Ribbon. This post will trim the sample to focus specifically on the RibbonGallery usage To whet our appetite, the dropdown of both the controls are RibbonGallery controls The gallery can be hosted in the following Ribbon Controls: § RibbonMenuButton § RibbonSplitButton § RibbonComboBox § RibbonMenuItem § RibbonSplitMenuItem § RibbonApplicationMenuItem § RibbonApplicationSplitMenuItem...

Kael has a nice series on the Zoomable Canvas control The usage is something like < ListBox.ItemsPanel > < ItemsPanelTemplate > < ZoomableCanvas Loaded ="ZoomableCanvas_Loaded" RealizationLimit ="1000" RealizationRate ="10" RealizationPriority ="Background"/> </ ItemsPanelTemplate > </ ListBox.ItemsPanel > ( Move the Slider right to see it in action ) (this is an xbap in an iframe. Would require IE\FireFox with .NET4 on your machine) Slide the slider right to populate the canvas. You can zoomin\out using the mouse scroll. Share this post

One of the interesting things you could easily do with the Xaml Toolkit is manipulation of Xaml. For example, in the case of XamlPadX, if we copy pasted xaml from a WPF application, it wouldnt render because of events, unknown members and so forth. We would need to extract these members in order to make the xaml render. Using the Xaml Toolkit, its pretty simple.

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So you have Ribbon, Menu, RibbonTab, and then the Ribbon Group. When you create a new Ribbon application, you get this wireframe ready – so its easy to start.

You got the group – lets populate it. If you look at the Xaml, the Ribbon controls have a SmallImageResource and a LargeImageResource property. This enables the ribbon to use the appropriate image when resizing. Each control can also have rich tooltips by setting the following properties

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The Ribbon Control is now available to the public for download. If you havent taken a look yet, would definitely recommend it.

A neat thing about this release is that it includes a design time plugin to VS. So out of the box you have a template in VS, when creating a new project

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So one of the uses of the XamlToolkit is to write FXCop rules for XAML. We provide the Microsoft.Tools.Xaml.FxCop.dll which has some inbuilt XAML rules that you can try out. You could also write new ones by referencing this dll. One of the queries I got in response to my previous post was how do i get the rules running. So here go the steps Step1 : Install FxCop Step2 : Update FxCop.exe.config (this is located at %ProgramFiles(x86)%\ Microsoft FxCop 1.36 ) to run on .NET 4 Add the following at the bottom of the file just before the </configuration> tag < startup > < supportedRuntime version ="v4.0"/> </ startup > Step3 : Open FxCop.exe (this is located at %ProgramFiles(x86)%\ Microsoft...

One of the nice things that you can do with it is write XAML FXCop rules. Now there has been a common ask of getting FXCop running on Xaml. Currently VS doesnt support this; but now you have the functionality at your tooltips. The toolkit has a Microsoft.Xaml.Tools.FxCop.dll which provides the base structure for your rules. So you could easily extend the inbuilt set of rules with that of your own.

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We are happy to announce the release of the second CTP of the XAMLToolkit. Where do i get it: LINK The toolkit comprises of: A XAML DOM Fxcop rule authoring support for XAML SilverlightSchemaContext that enables System.Xaml to parse SL XAML. We greatly appreciate your feedback... Bugs are welcome as well :)

We are happy to announce the release of the second CTP of the XAMLToolkit. Where do i get it: LINK The toolkit comprises of: A XAML DOM Fxcop rule authoring support for XAML SilverlightSchemaContext that enables System.Xaml to parse SL XAML. We greatly appreciate your feedback... Bugs are welcome as well :) Share this post

Generally, when theres an open spec format, theres usually a set of tests that ensure that the spec is being followed right. As as example, the Acid tests help in deterning the support of web standards in different web browsers. So when it came to XAML, we (Xaml team) decided that we should have a basic set of tests that can be used to determine whether the parser implementation is compliant with the XAML spec. You can find the latest XAML spec at ( LINK ) So here we have it, V1 of the XAML Compliance suite of tests. The suite consists of two parts: a custom type library and a collection of xaml files that use those types. The types are self verifiable - so using the library would need users to have a simple function that exercises their...

BeeEye is a Bing Image viewer application. Its got a very Blend ish look and feel and was a quick project for our intern, Aykut Bal. Its Multitouch enabled and also has some facebook integration. The search history keep track of previous image searches along with the thumbnails. It also showcases the jumplist feature in Win7. you can find the app\code at LINK .. Give it a try... Share this post

TestAPI - It is a library of test and utility APIs that enables developers and testers to create testing tools and automated tests for .NET and Win32 applications. TestApi provides a set of common test building blocks -- types, data-structures and algorithms -- in a simple, layered, componentized and documented stack. Its now the 5th version. In this release, we have put in a lot of fixes and updated things. - New Theme Changing API - enables testing on different OS themese - Sub image comparison support - Revamped variation generation API - Fixes\updates to command line parsing, tests, string generation, ..... Please do send feedback. Features are driven based on user feedback :) Share this post

VS 2010 power tools are out.. You can download it from HERE its got a bunch of tools like Customizing Tab Behavior HTML copy Highlight current line to easily identify the caret Ctrl+Click to go to definition Align Assignments ... Share this post

You can now download the perf tools for WPF in .NET4. These tools can be use for profiling both 3.5 and 4.0 applications. The tools come as part of the Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 (Windows SDK 7.1) download. If you havent yet tried it, please do so. The install also deploys a chm file which documents the tool usage Share this post

One of the common complaints I have heard is that it is difficult to have a glass chrome like windows. Yeah, you could set the style to None, but then you would need to have code handling window behaviors like resize, close.... No more.. two of our devs (Adam Smith\Joe Castro) have written the WPF Shell integration library which allows you to do this very easily.. You can get the code\binaries from this link "The custom chrome feature allows applications control over the outer frame of the window so that WPF content can be drawn over the title bar. This allows applications to integrate with Aero glass to emulate the Office 2007/2010 look and feel, or to completely replace the frame with its own content without having to manage all the system...