I've been playing with this build for a little while on my Windows XP partition, and I already miss it when I'm forced to use an alternative machine. The combination of tabbed browsing and thumbnailing, RSS feed subscription, filtering and searching, integrated search, page zoom and trustworthy printing all make my life easier as an end-user, and the enhanced accuracy of CSS and XHTML rendering will be a great relief to developers everywhere. (And did I hear "transparent PNG"?)
Download it yourself from the Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 7 home page. Note that this is a preview of the beta and is intended for developers and technology enthusiasts, rather than people like my mother (who wouldn't ever describe herself in either of the above categories!)
Oh, and here's the obligatory WPF-relevant piece - try clicking on a .xaml or .xbap link with IE 7 installed... see what you can discover.
It's time for me to return to my roots. After nearly a year away from my home country, I'm heading over to Europe next week for a series of customer visits and early adopter training sessions in the UK and Germany. Although I love every aspect of living in the Pacific Northwest and working in Redmond, I'm greatly looking forward to some time catching up with family and old friends.
Whilst I'm there, I've been offered an opportunity that was to good to miss: a chance to speak at an MSDN Evening event at Microsoft's UK campus in Reading. These events used to be an almost weekly occurrence when I worked for Microsoft UK, and I really miss the regular opportunities to connect with so many colleagues in the developer community. Naturally, my topic for the evening will be Windows Presentation Foundation: I'm trying to figure out how many demos and code samples I can squeeze into one presentation, and how few slides I can get away with.
So if you're in the Greater London / home counties area on Wednesday 15th February, I'd like to invite you to come along and see one of the coolest technologies around for web and Windows development. Registration is completely free, and there are 120 seats available on a first-come, first-served basis. Further details are here, and you can register here.
Hope to see you there!
It's gone midnight Pacific time, so it's safe for me to write a post that I've been wanting to write for many months.
Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer (the product formerly known as "Sparkle") is finally available in the form of its first CTP! This build runs on the December 05 and January 06 CTPs. We finally have preview tools available for both developers ("Cider") and designers ("Sparkle") to start to build integrated application projects. We first showed Expression publicly at the PDC, and it was the most popular hands-on lab there. Here's a quick set of steps to show off one nice feature of Expression very quickly:
At any time you can check out the XAML code tab to see or edit the generated code. The projects that Expression creates are standard MSBuild .proj files, so you can simply double-click on one to open it in Visual Studio and do additional work with it.
Experiment and have fun! Just two points to remember:
Expression Interactive Designer is just one of a suite of design tools that we're working on right now. Expression Graphic Designer is a companion tool that enables creation of vector graphics. Once you're done, simply choose File / Export to XAML to create a XAML rendering that can be imported directly into Expression Interactive Designer or any other WPF project.
Lastly, here are a few additional resources to check out:
[Update: Note that this build Expression Interactive Designer does not execute successfully on 64-bit editions of Windows. There are also some issues on non-Pentium architectures - please check the notes on the download page before installing.]
Have fun!
Although Windows Presentation Foundation offers tremendous power to those who master it, for a newcomer the technology can be somewhat daunting. Particularly at this current time when the documentation isn't complete and the tools are only partially available, it's a common experience to install all the pre-requisite components and then think, "Now what?"
I'm pleased to announce the availability of twelve hands-on labs covering all major feature areas of Windows Presentation Foundation, available for download from the MSDN WinFX site (link goes directly to the MSI). These labs are updates of the ones we had available in PDC hands-on labs area, and they run on any of the most recent three monthly Community Technology Preview (CTP) releases of WinFX (i.e. Jan 06, Dec 05 and Nov 05). Here's a quick rundown of the titles, so you know what you're downloading and installing:
I've listed them in a rough semblance of order, but there's no strict dependencies between them. We used these labs at an internal technical readiness event, and my best estimate is that it would take the best part of a week to work through them all - so there's plenty there! If you have to pick a subset to work through, my three personal favorites are the 2D and 3D, styling and data binding labs - those three cut right to the heart of what WPF is about and they are all very well-written labs.
I'd love your feedback on these labs - please add it to the comments section below. We're currently working on the final versions of these labs that will be made available with the v1.0 release of WPF, so I'm keen to incorporate any constructive feedback I receive. I'd love to know even if you just ran the labs through successfully.
Getting a new conference off the ground is hard. In contrast, marketing the PDC took comparatively little effort - as Steve Cellini, the event owner, joked the other day, "you could have just put one guy at the side of the road with a placard and the word would have spread from there". We sold out for PDC05 quickly - too quickly for some tastes. Right now we've just opened registrations for mix06, a new incubation event for web designers, developers and decision makers that revolves around web-based technologies from Microsoft. Our goal for this year is to use this event to drive an intimate, two-way "conversation", as well as provide a glimpse into some of the things we're doing in this space.
This is a pivotal area of innovation right now, with monikers like Web 2.0 and AJAX taking center stage. As a company we're focusing on enabling next-generation Internet-based applications with renewed vigor - Microsoft-watchers will know that every now and again BillG sends out a memo that defines the shape and theme of the next few years' innovation, and clearly the {Windows | Office | Xbox} Live services show where we're putting a lot of investment. Technologies such as ASP.NET "Atlas" and Windows Presentation Foundation are going to provide the platform for many Web 2.0 applications, but there's also other non-UI application services that are going to be powerful elements of the evolution of the Internet such as InfoCard, RSS Enclosures, and PeerChannel.
In short, if you want to keep abreast of some of the most strategic technologies Microsoft and others are working on, you want to see keynotes from Bill Gates and Tim O'Reilly, and you want to be ahead of the next big wave, then this conference is a good place to start. Hope you can make it!