Brad Abrams : Acropolis

New Acropolis Interview posted

BradA — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 18:39:42 GMT

The good folks over at Virtual TechEd recently posted an interview with the Acropolis folks... Take a look! (Other great interviews are there as well)

Welcome to Acropolis

Members from the Acropolis Team—Kathy Kam, David Hill, and Scott Morrison—explain the hype behind this new technology. What is Acropolis? It’s a set of components and tools that make it easier for you to build modular, business-focused applications on the .NET framework, and is part of the “.NET Client Futures” wave of releases, Microsoft’s preview of upcoming technologies for Windows client development. Blog Acropolis here.

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Acropolis July CTP is out!

BradA — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:44:23 GMT

Care to guess what the Acropolis team was doing right before the 4th of July holiday? Well, very, very late on July 3rd (or was that early on the 4th?) the team got the July CTP posted! Thanks folks!

This is a minor update to the bits we shipped at TechEd a few weeks back which contains a few of the most requested features and bug fixes from the forums and TechEd attendees.

Kathy lists a few of the cool new things to try out in the July CTP over on the Acropolis Team blog... In addition, we are polishing a new line of business focused example application that should be published soon.

Download the bits today and let us hear your feedback.

thanks!

Acropolis Interview on DotNetRocks!

BradA — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 08:55:50 GMT

I love the DNR guys... they recently posted a very good interview with the acropolis gang... Have a listen!

.NET Rocks! #248 - Introducing Acropolis
Carl and Richard talk with members of the Microsoft Acropolis team at TechEd 2007. Acropolis is a software factory-ish toolset that allows business developers to develop quality line-of-business WPF applications with ease.

Listen now or download in nearly any format you want...

Hang out to the end of talk to hear where the "Acropolis" name came from....

Enjoy!

Great acropolis explanations

BradA — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 07:15:25 GMT

Today I ran across two very interesting and well written explanations of different aspects of Acropolis written by folks outside of Acropolis team! I am stoked to fine such good stuff for an effort that is so early form folks that were not directly involved in building it. Thanks to everyone in the community who is jumping in head-first on acropolis...

Also, over on the Acropolis team blog, Kathy is aggregating useful acropolis posts from the team.. is there something else you'd like to see more information on?

Microsoft Codename Acropolis - Unwrapped

By Kevin Hoffman on The .NET Addict's Blog

In this post I take a look at Acropolis - what it is and why should developers be concerned about it. Also, I compare it to some offerings on OS X to help clear things up. <<...snip...>>

Parts. A part is a reusable, discrete component of business logic. Don't try and map this to an existing class in an existing app because unless you're currently doing composite app building using something like the CAB (Composite Application Block, another offering from Microsoft's Patterns and Practices gurus) you probably don't have any one object that performs this task. Let's say you're building a point of sale application and you have a screen that has a transaction ledger on it. You might (if you're a good little programmer) encapsulate the business logic required for maintaining a transaction ledger in a Part. This leads us to the next piece of the puzzle: Part Views.

Part View. A part view is essentially a self-contained class (comprised of both XAML and C#) that is the view of a part. In true and proper Model-View-Controller/Model-View-Presenter fashion, the view is responsible for receiving input from the user and rendering underlying data. It does nothing more than that.
Services. Unlike what the current buzz around the word "service" indicates, this is not a web service, nor is it a network service or a REST/POX service and it is not a 24-hour service station serving donuts (though, that would be awesome...mmm...donuts....). In the Acropolis (and generic Composite Application Programming terminology), a service is a self-contained piece of loosely coupled code that provides a service to a part or to the entire application. In the financial ledger example, you might have a Service that downloads transactions from the bank. That Service can then feed the transactions to the Part, which will be picked up automatically by bindings in the Part View. Savvy?
Service Dependencies. A service dependency is declared by a part or an application. In our overused ledger example, if the ledger part requires the existance of the BankDownloader service, it can use XAML to declare such a dependency. At runtime, the name of the dependency becomes a service instance, allowing you to write code (in the Part code-behind) like: BankDownloder.Download(myBank);
Connection Points. A connection point is that little dangly thing that we all used to love seeing on COM diagrams back in the day... It is a point of interface between the Part and containing Part Panes and Part Views. In the Acropolis implementation, connection points are really wrappers around a value of type System.Object that has special rigging for existing within the Acropolis framework and exposing itself to the Acropolis runtime.
Notifications. Notifications allow a part to send up a signal flare to other parts. If one part wants to convey useful information to another part, notifications allow data to be bundled inside.
Transitions and Navigators. A navigator is a tool that allows for navigation between parts that is either user-stimulated or fired programmatically (or both). When a navigator moves from one part to another, it can perform a transition such as a fade, a wipe, a slide, and Acropolis even comes with some fancy rotating cube effects, etc. The Acropolis runtime takes care of shuffling stuff in and out of memory, instantiating things and so on, leaving the developer free to think about his application in a truly compositional manner. In theory, this results in apps that are designed better, more reliable, and just...well..cooler.

Acropolis NavigationManager

By avalonboy

Microsoft Code Name "Acropolis" is a set of components and tools intended to make it easier for developers to build and manage modular, business focused, client applications for Microsoft Windows on the .NET Framework <<...snip...>>

Basically, a "NavigationItem" is associated to a child part during the application execution. See the schema below 3 Parts are dropped as Children in the application.

<<...snip...>>

Depending which kind of NavigationManager you use, the behavior is below:

With SinglePartNavigationManager, only the last added part is activated (TaskPadPart3) and 2 first are deactivated (TaskPadPart1 and TaskPadPart2). See Figure 1.
With MultiPartNavigationManager, all parts are activated (TaskPadPart1, TaskPadPart2 and TaskPadPart3). See Figure 2.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Acropolis CPU\Memory Watcher

BradA — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 05:08:00 GMT

One of the cool things about acropolis is that you can define different views for the same business logic. This separation of concerns between presentation and business logic is nothing new, but the core acropolis architecture makes it much easier to do.

The CPU\Memory Watcher demo is a great example of this power. And with the power of WPF, the views can be very cool...

The default view is a gauge view

But click on the command bar and you can change the view to a more data oriented graph view..

The other thing that is way cool about Acropolis is that while it fully expolits WPF, it is not tied to it... So you can even use the full graphics power of the command console!

You can get the source code here, but a few notes about the implementation...

1. On Vista, you will need to run as VS as administrator to access the perf counters

2. The view code for the console application is not as clean as we would like it to be, expect some changes in this space... but it is a good "under the covers" look at how acropolis works.

3. To compile the project for console, you have go into project, settings and change the startup object

Thanks to Nathan Enright, Scott McCraw and Daniel Irwin for pulling this demo together!

Some common Acroplis questions

BradA — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 17:05:41 GMT

Wow – there has been some really good buzz on acropolis in the last 24 hours… Reading over the blogs and stuff two interesting questions are popping out:

Question: When are you shipping Acropolis!!
Answer: As soon as it is ready ;-) Seriously, we are very early in the cycle here, we came out at Teched to get some early feedback and find out if we are going in the right direction. Acropolis will NOT ship with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5… Rather it will ship as an “option pack” style release that works super well with your Visual Studio 2008. Later we fully expect to fold in Acropolis into the next major release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.
Question: Does Acropolis support WinForms
Answer: Yes. While the UI aspects of acropolis (the themes, shell and transitions) are all built using WPF the base component model is UI tier agnostic. We believe it will be common to have “Parts” with “Views” in WinForms for example… Check out the RSSEagle example for more details on this. Further, it is certainly possible to build a full shell in WinForms…. If anyone is interested in working on a WinForms shell for acropolis let me know, we’d be happy to help!

More on the Acropolis buzz

I am amazed that anyone has had time in the last 24 hours to drill in, but a couple of folks have

Enterprise WPF Applications come of "Age" with Acropolis
by Don.NET
Today at WindowsClient.net (Microsoft's new portal for WPF and Winforms) Microsoft introduced the next step in the WPF revolution their "Acropolis" CTP. This is a toolkit for creating modular, business-focused Windows client ...
Don.NET's WPF Designers Blog - http://blog.donburnett.com/
Microsoft "Acropolis"
by Andrej Tozon
If you're on a look for a powerful, extensible application framework for building service-oriented, rich WPF applications, here's a preview of what you can expect from Microsoft in (possibly near) future: Microsoft Acropolis CTP1 is ...
Andrej Tozon's blog - http://tozon.info/blogs/andrej/default.aspx

SYS-CON Media
AJAX World - My First "Acropolis" Application
SYS-CON Media, NJ
NET Framework (Wrox Press) and co-author with Robert Foster of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed. Kevin authors "The .NET Addict's Blog" at . ...

In addition there are tons of folks that talking about the feature set, etc

Acropolis CTP Released
by Shannon Braun
Look's like the Acropolis CTP was released a couple of days ago... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=72386ce5-f206-4d5c-ab09-413b5f31f935&displaylang=en&tm.
Shannon Braun's Weblog - http://www.sysknowlogy.com/
"Acropolis" CTP available for download
The cat is finally out of the bag and available for discussion - Microsoft's "Acropolis" project. Even though I decided to go ahead and port a major project to the CAB (Composite Application Building Block), I have spend the past few ...
Acropolis - http://www.rssmicro.com/?f=1&q=Acropolis
Links (6/4/2007)
12 hours ago by Steve Pietrek
Hello Acropolis - "Acropolis" is a set of components and tools that enables you to build composite client application. Acropolis CTP 1 available; Microsoft acquires Dundas’s data visualization components, SQL 2008 news & download CTP3 ...
A Continuous Learner's Weblog - http://spietrek.blogspot.com/ - References
.NET Client futures- Microsoft code name "Acropolis"
by malovicn
The Microsoft code name “Acropolis” Community Technology Preview 1 is a set of components and tools that make it easier for developers to build and manage modular, business focused, client .NET applications. Acropolis is part of the “. ...
VusCode - Coding dreams since 1998! - http://blog.vuscode.com/malovicn/default.aspx
Acropolis
Integrate and host your modules in applications such as Microsoft Office, or quickly build stand-alone client interfaces. Change the look and feel of your application quickly using built-in themes, or custom designs using XAML. ...
MSDN Blog Postings - http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com
Microsoft Code Name "Acropolis" Community Technology Preview Released
15 hours ago
Microsoft has released the Code Name "Acropolis" Community Technology Preview.
digg / dig - http://digg.com/
Microsoft Code Name "Acropolis" Community Technology Preview Released
by tadanderson
Microsoft has released the Code Name "Acropolis" Community Technology Preview. This is from the help file that you can download from the link below:. "Acropolis" uses a composite application framework to address complex, ...
Real World Software Architecture - http://realworldsa.blogspot.com/
Microsoft Code Name “Acropolis” Community Technology Preview Released
16 hours ago
Microsoft has released the Code Name “Acropolis” Community Technology Preview. Original post by technology - Google News.
DETECHNORATI - http://detechnorati.com
Microsoft announces "Acropolis" for building composite client ...
16 hours ago by trumpi
"Acropolis" is a set of components and tools that enables you to build composite client application. Great client application has three main components. It has to be cheap to buld, easy to manage and offers a high quality user ...
Trumpi's Blog - http://dotnet.org.za/trumpi/default.aspx
[VistaSoftware] Digest Number 748
by BollywoodX2
Download "Acropolis" Framework for WPF Posted by: "Zia Khan (Hotmail)" ziaukhan@hotmail.com ziaukhan1 Date: Mon Jun 4, 2007 5:37 am ((PDT)). http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx? ...
Vista Software Development - http://vista-software.blogspot.com/
Microsoft "Acropolis"
by Andrej Tozon
If you're on a look for a powerful, extensible application framework for building service-oriented, rich WPF applications, here's a preview of what you can expect from Microsoft in (possibly near) future: Microsoft Acropolis CTP1 is ...
Andrej Tozon's blog - http://tozon.info/blogs/andrej/default.aspx
Microsoft Code Name _quot;Acropolis_quot; CTP Available
21 hours ago
Acropolis_Help: The Community Technology Preview 1 version of Microsoft Code Name "Acropolis" Help documentation. Download: Microsoft Code Name "Acropolis" Community Technology Preview 1.
Windows portal - News - http://keznews.com/news.php?title=News
Microsoft codename "Acropolis": sounds good!
by Stefano Demiliani
An interesting project seems to come out from Microsoft in these days. Microsoft codename "Acropolis" (actually only a CTP) is a set of components and tools intended to make it easier for developers to build and manage modular, ...
STEFANO DEMILIANI - http://demiliani.com/blog/Default.aspx

And the buzz extends to just about any language you’d like

AcroplisはMFCになれるか？
by ishisaka
Microsoft code name "Acropolis" - WindowsClient.net. ここに来てやっとビジネスアプリケーションを構築するためのWPFベースのフレームワークが出てきてくれたかという感じがします。 AcroplisはWPFでビジネスアプリケーションを構築するための、 ...
OPC Diary - http://www.isisaka.com/blog/
Microsoft Codename: Acropolis CTP
by chris
Piensen en Acropolis como los antiguos Application Blocks, pero mejor integrados dentro de un marco de trabajo y obviamente utilizando las herramientas de la siguiente generación de la plataforma .NET de Microsoft. ...
chris.strevel [blog] - http://team.intellekt.ws/blogs/chris/default.aspx
Novidades do TechEd 2007 Orlando: Acropolis e Orcas!
by Roberto Sonnino
Pra começar, temos o Microsoft Code Name “Acropolis”, que basicamente é um framework para fábricas de software que permitirá fazer Smart Clients com WinForms e WPF! E tudo como uma fábrica deve ser, com módulos bem definidos e ...
Virtual Dreams - http://virtualdreams.com.br/blog
Acropolis
Microsoftから新しいクライアントテクノロジーが出てきました。コードネームは"Acropolis"です。CTP1がダウンロードできます。 Microsoft code name "Acropolis" - WindowsClient.net. 一口で言うと、WPFでSDIやMDIを作るためのフレームワークと言った ...
C#とかSharePointとかVistaとか - http://ishiharajunichi.spaces.live.com/
Microsoft Code Name Acropolis CTP 1
by .Net Adventure Center
Otras de las novedades del día es la presentación de Acropolis, el cual es un framework y un conjunto de herramientas pensadas para el desarrollo de Smart Clients, con Acropolis podemos desarrollar partes o pequeñas unidades de código ...
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) - http://wpf.netfx3.com/blogs/default.aspx
TechEd US 2007 - News & Announcements
by Damir Tomicic
SQL Server Katmai [1] will be known as Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio Orcas [2] is Microsoft Visual Studio 2008..." Überrascht? Nicht wirklich. Desweiteren wurde ein neues UI Framework für WPF mit dem Codenamen "Acropolis" ...
Damir Tomicic : ein Tag in der Community - http://tomicic.de/

Thanks to EVERYONE that posted... Keep up the Buzz! and do let me know if I missed anyone...

Hello Acropolis!

BradA — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 23:06:00 GMT

Back in 2005 I spent a week with our Product Support professionals “helping” to answer support calls… I was amazed that at the world’s largest software company the tools these folks use were not well integrated (I believe it has sense been addressed). A customer call comes in via one application giving some limited caller ID type of information, the operator cuts-and-paste the name from there into another app to look up their account status, then opens a case in a tracking application and again cut-and-pasts that information in and then opens up a website to check out the availability of a hot fix the customer was asking for.. Wow.. one simple action 4-5 applications. Why didn’t we have one application to unify them all? Well, our story my sound familiar, different parts of IT, different legacy systems, different schedules, different backends, etc, etc.

But even under these constraints, there has to be a better solution… and indeed there is.. over the last few years the notion of modular, composite frameworks have been embraced. CAB is very popular and in the web space Rails has gained some interest and generally customers continue to ask me for simple solutions that help them focus on their business problems rather than plumbing code.

To that end, we have created the acropolis project as the first in a set of investments we are making around the .NET Client “futures”. Acropolis is an initial “experiment” at up leveling the .NET Framework application model to enable more modular application that enables developers to focus on their business logic while reaping the benefits of Xaml and WPF and of course carrying forward all of your existing Windows Forms assets.

So check out the latest on http://windowsclient.net/Acropolis/

1. Downloads: Download the bits

2. Learning: Watch this video and read the docs (on line version coming)

3. Communing:

Hang out on the forums

Check out these blog
· Kathy Kam – PM for the UI space on the team
· David Hill – Sr. PM\Architect on the team
· Ricky Tan – Developer on the team
· Acropolis team blog – Stay tuned

And if you are at TechEd, drop by the booth and come to our talks!

· DEV302 - Windows .NET Client: Introducing the “Acropolis” Client Application Framework - David Hill
· DEV318 - Windows .NET Client: Building Rich Client UI with the “Acropolis” Framework - Kathy Kam

Enjoy and we’d love to hear from you!

Here is a screenshot of an acropolis application in design mode in Orcas beta1