It’s been a little while in coming, but I’m delighted to announce that we’ve shipped the latest release of Family.Show, our reference application for WPF development. Family.Show started a couple of years ago, when WPF was in its infancy and a few of us were looking for ways to showcase the power of the platform as a way for developers to build beautiful Windows applications. We approached our friends at Vertigo Software with a request to partner with us in building a WPF sample that would be both a beautiful application in its own right as well as a great learning tool for aspiring WPF developers. After experimenting with a few scenarios, we picked genealogy: not only is it one of the most popular hobbies out there, but it’s also a category of application that closely models a number of (rather more boring) enterprise scenarios.
Fast forward to 2009, and it’s been really fun to see how Family.Show has been used as an application. We’ve been approached by authors who use it to track the characters in their fiction novel, it’s been featured in genealogy magazines, and it’s been downloaded many thousands of times by developers all across the world. Since it’s licensed under our most permissive license, you’re welcome to reuse any or all of the code for your own purposes or to take concepts and build them into your own application.
In this third major release, we knew it was time to refresh some of the code to take advantage of the new innovations in the latest releases of WPF (for example, data validation, LINQ, and so on). We’ve also been reading through the feature requests on the Codeplex site and have implemented a number of suggestions to make it an even better tool for general purpose genealogy purposes. (For example, you can now marry your cousin!) We’ve done a lot of work to refactor the code: componentizing several of the controls to make them more easily reusable in other applications. Lastly, we thought it would be great to create a hands-on lab that made it possible for developers to start to experiment with Family.Show and learn WPF using the application.
We’ve put all this together into a new release that we’ve packaged up on Codeplex. Check it out and let us know what you think!
We’re not done – we’re actively working on the v4 release, which will come out relatively quickly and take further advantage of .NET 3.5 SP1. We’re working with a few interested developers from outside Microsoft who are also interested in extending Family.Show – if you have a patch you’d like to submit, we’d warmly encourage you to do so.
Check out Family.Show on Codeplex or indeed on Vertigo’s website, where they have a ClickOnce version of the application ready to go (requires .NET 3.5 or later).
Not a huge release this one, but we've just shipped an update for Silverlight 2 that fixes a number of minor bugs that have been reported over the last couple of months.
Get it while it's hot, here:
Note that the developer tools page may have an old date/timestamp on it still, but the binary is the new updated version. You have the GDR1 if your Silverlight version is 2.0.40115.0 (the original Silverlight 2 version was 2.0.31005.0).
Here is a list of the main changes in the GDR (build 2.0.40115.0):
It's also worth highlighting Tim Heuer's blog entry on the topic, which adds some good information about how to force users visiting your site to upgrade to the latest build if you're relying on one of the above fixes for your application.
Any good politician, regardless of leaning, knows that the language you use to frame a topic is key to how it is perceived. By repeatedly using pejorative terms to describe your own position and that of your opponents, you start to move a debate onto your own terms. Of course, those with a little more critical insight can see beyond the rhetoric, and note that the act of saying something is just wishful thinking if it’s not actually backed up by facts.
I was therefore somewhat intrigued to read Adobe’s latest commentary on Silverlight, which implies that AIR is in huge demand and that interest in Silverlight is waning. It’s obviously in Adobe’s interests to try and create this perception – they want to protect their Flash market share by shutting out new market entrants – but just saying something doesn’t make it true.
Let’s look at the record. Adobe claim that they have 100 million downloads of AIR, and that “the vast majority are being driven by great, popular applications”, listing the likes of Adobe Media Player, Tweetdeck and Twhirl as the most popular examples. Yet they have been actively bundling AIR with Adobe [Acrobat] Reader, one of the most downloaded applications on the Internet, and you don’t even have an option to opt out of its installation. Can it really be true that “the vast majority are being driven by great, popular applications”? By framing AIR in this way, Adobe are hoping to create a self-fulfilling prophecy – but the reality is rather less positive.
Similarly, the idea that Silverlight is in anything other than rude health is more to do with what Adobe would like to be the case, rather than what actually is the case. The suggestion that “Silverlight adoption has fizzled out in the last 6-9 months” is pretty risible, in fact. For starters, Silverlight 2 shipped four months ago, and in just the first month of its availability, we saw over 100 million successful installations just on consumer machines. That doesn’t sound like “fizzling out” to me – in fact, it makes Garrett’s comments seem as if he’s living in a fantasy world.
Let’s look at the kinds of applications that use Silverlight 2 to great effect. We’ve already talked a lot about how the NBC coverage of the Olympics took full advantage of Silverlight, delivering five times as many video streams as the 2004 event in HD quality. Since then, we’ve seen many similar sites go live. Just looking at the media space alone:
Of course, Silverlight is more than a media player – with a rich WPF-based application framework, enterprises and web sites are starting to use the new capabilities introduced in Silverlight 2 to build powerful RIAs. AOL Mail is just one very early example of this, but there are plenty of others in development that we’ll talk about in due course.
In short, we’re delighted with the progress of Silverlight, just four months after the release of Silverlight 2. While we’re not complacent about the work ahead, it’s almost amusing to read about stagnation when we’re seeing the Silverlight ecosystem really build momentum.
Don’t let Adobe’s attempt to frame the debate confuse you about the reality of the marketplace; instead, pick the tools that match your needs and skills. Whether you pick Flash or Silverlight, know that you’re choosing a technology that has broad market adoption and a vibrant ecosystem.