Hello all -
 Its been great to see the community interest in CAB. Thanks for your support! (Join us here: http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/cab)

We have 1000 users before our 2nd community drop!!!

   
As you know we are working hard to have an important release of CAB in July. This will be potentially the largest "pre-RTM" drop of CAB before VS 2005 releases, later on in the year. At that time we will refresh CAB to include feedback and additional features, work with Visual Studio 2005 .

For this release, we made a set of tradeoffs, and I wanted to share them.
1) We wanted to give you a high-quality and stable release early even if it meant additional incremental features would have to be added later on. We want to get your feedback on the fundamental elements of CAB and the development experience, especially as we plan the tooling for it.
2) We are holding ourselves to production-quality code standards & testing and we are building the best documentation experience we can within time constraints.

What does this mean in terms of what you'll get?
1) There's going to slightly less scope than you might have seen in slides and webcasts. The scope we have cut however is mostly "incremental" (can be added on later) or "invisible" (should not change the public API design or basic app architecture). Specifically we had to scale back on the following:

  • UIP. This is an incremental feature we plan on releasing to the community and integrating by the RTM date. It'll also give more time to the UIP community to react and give feedback to our candidate design.
  • Narrator. We understand that large applications built with CAB can benefit from a "visualization" tool that would assist understanding the runtime relationships between components. We have a lot of APIs (but no GUI) to help you see your application. Building this is important to let you undertsand, iterate, and communicate your runtime architecture, and thus helps you reach an application design faster.
  • UIElement Plugins: UI Elements are the way the Shell exposes shared UI thingies. We will include the fundamental architecture and 3 plugins for toolstrips, menu strips and status strips. Other useful UI elements (notification area icons & "balloons", splash screens, keystrokes, based on fancy 3rd party controls or ... clippy!) can be built following the same design.

As a matter of fact, I'm not too bummed out at having to postpone the UIP feature. The implication is significant. It means it's incremental. This is architecturally important and a result of our usage patterns of the container / component model "backbone" that holds CAB up internally. It means also that it doesn't affect your existing app at all (just like users of previous versions of UIP told us we really got in the way of how you built your UI layers. We solemnly promise to avoid the XML hell as well).

We are getting the test signoff emails on the preview as I type this, so as soon as Eugenio does the hand waving to get this on GotDotNet, you can get it yourself.