After I posted the availability of the Nov CTP bits, I had a question from Niels Berglund (a great mentor on all things SQLCLR) asking where the x64 version was.
I'd searched around for this for ages myself and had presumed that we just weren't making the x64 bits available, but it turns out that it's been linked from the bottom of the download page all the time and I was just blind. If you're running Windows XP Professional x64 Edition then you can use the 64-bit release of the WinFX Runtime Components in combination with the regular 32-bit SDK and developer tools to get the full working developer environment.
Of course, since WPF applications themselves are managed, there's no need to distribute separate 32-bit and 64-bit editions of your own application, since the CLR JIT compiler takes care of converting the IL into the relevant processor instructions.
Download the x64 bits here; pick up the x86 bits and the SDK / tools from this location. (And thanks to Arik Cohen for pointing out what should have been right in front of my nose in the first place...)
Some technologies are cut, others just get renamed so many times that people think they've been cut!
Ever since the first public unveiling of Windows Presentation Foundation, we've supported both standalone and browser-based applications. On the browser side, applications run in a partial-trust sandbox that allows a subset of WPF functionality to be supported securely. From Visual Studio, simply create a new project of type "WinFX Web Browser Application" (this presumes you've installed WinFX and the WinFX Extensions for Visual Studio) to create one of these projects.
In order to confuse as many people as possible, this technology has had myriad names over the last few public releases. In Beta 1, it was known as "Avalon Express", and the applications had a file extension of .xapp. However the Express name overlapped with our use of the word "express" to describe the lightweight versions of our developer tools, so in the PDC / September CTP release they were renamed to the simpler, more descriptive "Web Browser Application", with a .wba file extension. Time passes, and it turns out that the .wba extension is used by another product already, so to avoid application conflict, they were renamed again in the recent November CTP release to "XAML Browser Application", with a .xbap file extension. It's the third version of the name, so hopefully we've got it right this time.
Updated: I've enclosed some new samples here - the original ones I linked to are no longer compatible with more recent builds. Thanks to TheWPFBlog for these great samples that run on Windows Vista RC1.
I try to be a good Microsoft citizen - using our software wherever possible, providing feedback to the product teams, filing bugs, and generally dogfooding. (Hopefully that doesn't imply that I'm blinkered to the merits of other software: I certainly don't mean to imply that we have the best product in every space, or that I only use Microsoft software.) But there are times when some technological barrier prevents me from "doing the right thing", and that's frustrating.
One particular example recently has been personal email. Like a lot of people I know, I keep my work and personal email separate for various reasons, and I bought a ten-year lease on a vanity domain name a little while back. I don't want to be tied to a single mail provider for the rest of my life, and I want to retain some control over my email address as well as having something that's easy to remember. Of course, this has precluded me from using Hotmail, the shared personal calendar services, the new Kahuna mail beta, or a number of other new Windows Live services that we're starting to roll out, as well as the inconvenience of having to maintain my own mail server. On the other hand, I don't want to become timsneath186@hotmail.com just to benefit from those services.
I was therefore delighted to see an internal mail announcing the launch of a new Windows Live service yesterday that allows you to be a fully-fledged member of the Windows Live world whilst bringing your own domain. Windows Live Custom Domains allows you to use Hotmail (or soon, Kahuna) for email whilst retaining your domain name. You just register the domain of your choice and point the MX record to the Hotmail servers (having registered on the Windows Live site), and you can then simply sign in with your own email address to Hotmail and receive mail there. For me, it was quick and painless to move my entire family over to the new service - barely five minutes' downtime and we were receiving mail at the new location. Now my wife can get at her email from anywhere without relying on a POP3 client; we can see our email as part of the live.com portal, and we've got free email with integrated IM capabilities.
If you've got a personal domain, try it out - you can always switch back again if you don't like it. You can be the hero of your family by registering a vanity domain name related to your surname and then handing out vanity Hotmail addresses! And I can breathe a sigh of relief that I'm being a good corporate citizen and start sending useful feedback!
More details on Windows Live Custom Domains at the team blog on MSN Spaces.
In response to my last post announcing the WinFX Runtime Components November CTP, kettch posts the following:
"this is not a beta this is a ctp. CTP's are by their very nature broken. With beta releases there is an effort made to fix some bugs and at least get things somewhat stable, with the CTP there is not such guarentee."
I just wanted to respond to this comment and expand a little on the difference between these releases.
Firstly, I wouldn't go so far as to say that CTPs are "by their very nature broken", but rather I'd say that they're of indeterminate quality. With beta releases, we spend a period of time stabilizing builds, moving it into "escrow" (where we try and keep the core components at a known quality level and thereby better understand where the biggest bugs are), and generally getting help, release docs and other pieces into a good state. I'd go so far as to say that we go through a more rigorous testing process for our betas than some companies go through for their final release. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that our beta builds are bug-free or that they are ready to release, rather that we've gone through an effort to bring the build into some kind of consistent state and know what the build quality is.
On the other hand, CTP releases are pretty much just a snapshot of the daily build at a given point. Obviously we do some basic testing to verify that the build isn't broken, and some teams and products go a step further and do a mini-stabilization pass, but in general you shouldn't make any particular presumptions about the quality of a CTP. In the case of the release we've just announced, it so happens that this release occurs midway through a bug push, so the general quality is pretty good, but there are a couple of nasty gotchas. From the WPF side, there's a nasty bug that causes a performance regression for 3D graphics: it's significantly worse than previous releases (the bug is fixed now, by the way), and there's also an issue with playing multiple videos simultaneously. Unfortunately, that's the penalty one pays in return for getting more transparency into the current state of the product - we're airing all our dirty laundry with builds like this. Those two bugs I mentioned above would almost certainly have been showstoppers for a beta release, but since the overriding goal of the CTP releases is to minimize disruption to the development team (and thus to the schedule), it's better to live with them and move on.
None of this in any way reduces the fact that we want to help you out if you're experiencing blocking issues with installing the WinFX Runtime Components or you're hampered from making progress - of course, one of the benefits of releasing CTPs from our perspective is to get feedback and new bug reports. Some good web-based forums to go to for reporting issues or submitting feedback are here:
With every CTP, we're another step closer... This release is particularly exciting, because it is based on the final .NET Framework 2.0 bits. You've no excuse now for not installing WinFX and starting to prototype a great Windows Presentation Foundation application! Download the various bits from the following locations:
My esteemed colleague Karsten Januszewski has stepped up to the mark and produced a great white paper that describes the new features added to WPF in this CTP release (there's some great new animation work that's exposed here) as well as highlighting the API breaking changes since the PDC release. We're gradually getting closer to being API complete for the first release - there's probably just one more set of breaking changes to go in that will be exposed in a CTP release in the first month or two of next year, but otherwise we're entering the glidepath - starting to focus on performance and stability beyond all other considerations. It's going to be an exciting year!