Jaime Rodriguez : Client in general

List of features to track in WPF4 and the details on beta1

jaimer — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:51:00 GMT

I am late to this but still wanted to share an “insider view” into the status of “WPF 4” in the recently released .NET Framework 4 and VS 2010 beta1.

Status of the run-time (on the public beta 1).
The WPF team cranked hard until last minute on 3.5 SP1 so they have been playing catch-up to .NET 4 and VS2010. The beta does not really do justice to the progress the team is making towards RTM. In a few cases, the team ‘compromised’ not shipping the feature in beta1 to optimize for the RTM schedule (preparing a beta does take integration work and testing, plus they had to put the longer/harder features up-front to decrease ship risks).
Beta2 appears to be in good shape for you to preview and share feedback still before .NET 4 RTMs.

For those looking into beta1, I would say the two areas where we need feedback will be:

The new XAML stuff (in particular we want to make sure we do not break you)
The tools ( Cider designer); I would love to hear what people think of the new features.

Want to learn more about beta1. Here is a bit of the action:

Video Interview with Ian Ellison Taylor WPF and Silverlight GM, and Kevin Gjerstad, WPF Group Program Manager. It pretty much discusses what is in and out (for beta1 and RTM).
Rob Relyea recorded a video on the XAML enhancements. This is a must watch and then follow it with this post and any other recent posts in Rob’s blog.
Jossef Goldberg has a great post on client profile in .NET4. We recorded a video, to be posted in the next few days; look for it here via update to this post, or in the continuum show.
Tomorrow we are shooting the Touch video; ironically they reached feature complete in beta2 today, maybe we can get a peek; video should be posted early next week.
[If you want to know why I am posting today instead of next week, we are doing LOB Tour in NY this weekend, so I am out on the road again. I hope you understand, post will be updated as we go]
WindowsClient.net now has a new section for the Cider designer. Karl Shifflett and the Cider crew will be putting videos there as they go. For starters, Mark Wilson-Thomas has a good “Lap Around Cider in beta1 .

On the way to .NET 4.
Here is my view into the new features I am tracking and current (best guess) estimate on timelines. The list is not all inclusive, so let me know if I missed one you cared about. note that this list focuses on new stuff; I did not include all the bug fixes and minor improvements to existing stuff.

Huge WARNING!! None of the below features are guaranteed. Nothing is official until we RTM.
Please do not make assumptions or plans based on this list.

Category	Feature	In beta 1	Expected by beta 2
Windows 7 light-up
	Multi-Touch	Basic manipulation and inertia. Raw touch events are not in.	Yes. Beta1 + Raw touch. A few tiny breaking changes.
	Taskbar integration	Not in beta 1	Yes
	Vista + Win7 Native Dialogs	Yes	Same as beta1
	Ribbon (though it is not win7 specific at all).	Not in beta 1	Ribbon will be shipping out of band still. Next preview ships after beta2. It will RTM by .NET 4 RTM or earlier.
Graphics& Text
	Text enhancements	Not in beta 1	Yes
	Cached Composition	Not in beta1	Yes
	Support for Pixel Shaders written w/ HLSL 3.0	Not in beta 1	Yes
	Caret customization	Not in beta 1	Yes
	ClearTypeHint	Yes	Same as beta1
	Legacy effects get cut	Yes. Old legacy Bitmapeffects are a no-op, unless it is one of the effects that are hardware accelerated.	Same as beta1
Fundamentals & AppModel
	XAML 2009	Beta1	Yes, minor changes.
	LayoutRounding	Not in beta1	Yes
	Bindable Run	Not in beta1	Yes
	Visual State Manager	Not in beta1.	In by beta2, now shipping in the framework.
	Animation Easing functions	Yes	Same as beta 1
	Datagrid	Yes. Moved from toolkit to framework. Minor bug fixes.	Same as beta 1.
	DatePicker	Move from toolkit to framework. Minor fixes.	Same as beta1.
	Full Trust XBAP	Not in beta1	Yes
	Databinding improvements	Not in beta1.	Yes
Deployment
	Client Profile	New client profile is in, but no web bootstrapper. Still needs to be compressed (for size).	Yes, full functionality.
	Client Profile Configurator	No. Will ship out of band.	No. Will ship out of band.
Tools
	VS2010 Cider	Cider has a lot of improvements. Perf work is not done.	Yes.
	VS2010 new Editor	Since the text enhancements are not in the run-time, the editor does not get them.	Yes.

Note: At PDC, we said that DeepZoom would be in WPF4. Unfortunately that feature has been cut. We just could not squeeze it into the schedule. There are workarounds to it: you can host Silverlight inWPF using web browser control or using the Silverlight hosting APIs.

Details on the features:
Below are high level descriptions around the features listed above. Must share that Ted Hu created the descriptions for a different document and I am shamelessly plagiarizing it. Thanks Ted.

Multi-touch
Windows 7 is introducing multi-touch input and manipulation processing, which Windows Presentation Foundation exposes. Multiple finger input will be exposed through existing and new input events, while new manipulation and inertia events will be exposed for developers to consume.

Multi-touch Manipulation and Inertia (Pan, Zoom, Rotate) events on UIElement
Raw Multi-touch events (Up, Move, Down) on UIElement, UIElement3D and ContentElement
Multiple capture supporting multiple active controls
ScrollViewer enhancement to support multi-touch pannning
Touch device extensibility
Future Surface SDK compatibility

Windows 7 Shell Integration
WPF 4 exposes several new Windows 7 Shell features to WPF developers These Shell features empower application authors to provide a richer, integrated user experience. The new taskbar is less cluttered and can convey more information at a glance. The Aero thumbnails support user commands. Jump lists provide access to contextual startup tasks and files available to the application.
WPF 4 will integrate Windows 7 JumpList functionality, including:

Tasks
Items
Recent and Frequent Lists integration
Custom Categories

Taskbar integration including:

Progress bar
Overlay Icon
Thumbnail buttons with commanding support
Description Text
DWM Thumbnail clipping

Text enhancements
WPF 4.0 Beta 2 introduces a new text rendering stack which allows for much clearer text rendering. This change adds the necessary knobs to allow WPF text to look virtually indistinguishable from Windows’ traditional GDI-rendered text. The clarity improvements also dramatically improve readability for many East Asian languages.

ClearType hint
ClearTypeHint allows app authors to enable cleartype when rendering text to IntermediateRenderTargets, where it would normally be disabled by the system. The system normally disables cleartype on IRTs because Cleartype only works properly when it’s rendered to an opaque surface, and it’s extremely difficult for the system to determine if an IRT will be rendered with transparency. By Setting this to true, you’re basically letting the system know that the IRT is transparent. This means you can now enable cleartype with layered windows, in Visual/Drawing brushes, in Effects, and in 3D if you so desired it.

Full-Trust XBAP
Starting in WPF 4.0, the ClickOnce elevation prompt is enabled for XAML Browser Applications (XBAPs) in Intranet and Trusted Zones, making it easier to deploy full-trust XBAPs. For XBAPs that require security permissions greater than the minimum code access security (CAS) permission grantset of the Intranet and Trusted Zones, the user will be able to click 'Run' on the ClickOnce elevation prompt when they navigate to the XBAP to allow the XBAP to run with the requested permissions.

LayoutRounding
WPF 4.0 will adopt the LayoutRounding property, originally introduced in Silverlight2. WPF’s layout engine frequently calculates sub-pixel positioning coordinates. This can lead to rendering artifacts as elements positioned on sub-pixel boundaries are antialiased over multiple physical pixels. LayoutRounding will force the layout engine to place elements on whole pixel boundaries, thus removing most of the rendering artifacts caused by this problem.

Bindable Run
The Run class has had a simple CLR property Text since the first release of the framework. In WPF 4.0 we have backed Run.Text with a dependency property. Among the many benefits of being a DP, Run.Text now supports data binding. One-way binding (from data source to Run.Text) is fully supported, and two-way binding is supported as long as the Run is not modified via the Text OM or from a RichTextBox.

Selection and caret customization
Simple app customization is a great WPF strength. In the past, the selection color and caret color for text input and reading controls (TextBox, RichTextBox, FlowDocumentReader, etc...) has been hard coded. WPF 4.0 will introduce the SelectionBrush and CaretBrush properties. These properties will allow developers to control the brush used to draw both selection and carets in many WPF controls.

Animation Easing functions
Is the exact same functions we announced in Silverlight 3; I can not tell you who created them first; funny how schedules work; but really nice to have compatibility.

BindingExpressionBase.ValidateWithoutUpdate does for a single binding expression what BindingGroup.ValidateWithoutUpdate does for a binding group – namely it starts the validate/update process but stops just before writing a value back to the source item

When BindingGroup.SharesProposedValues is true, the binding group will keep track of proposed values even when the UI elements that hold them are replaced. This supports a UI design pattern used by DataGrid (for example), where only one source property is presented with an “editing template” (containing editable controls – TextBox) while the other properties are presented with “display templates” (containing non-editable controls – TextBlock). As the user focuses a new property, its display template is replaced by an editing template, while the previously focused property’s editing template is replaced by a display template. The BindingGroup now manages the proposed value (if any) held by the old editing template, so that it can be displayed (if possible) in the display template and written back to the source when the user commits the binding group

LayoutRounding
Speaks for the feature already in Silverlight, where the layout system rounds any non-integral values at the time of a layout pass. This helps prevent the sub-pixel anti-aliasing effects that people describe as "blurriness"

MIX09 recap series part3, The Microsoft Client Continuum

jaimer — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:33:00 GMT

In part 2 of the series, I explained the different target scenarios for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

I think at MIX09, we could have emphasized a bit more strongly our Microsoft Client Continuum. We demonstrated it a lot, but maybe did not take time to explain it, or explicitly call it, so I wonder if every one knows about it externally?

The “Microsoft Client Continuum” is our mission to empower you to create the Best User Experiences across all your customer’s touch points.

Today, you can reach customers on a web application (RIA), on Windows, on Surface, on Mobile devices, etc.
On part 2 of this series, I explained that one single run-time is likely not flexible enough to address the conflicting requirements (size vs. features, or full-trust vs. sandboxed) from all scenarios; if you want to provide the absolutely best experience across multiple touch points, you will likely end up at least compiling the application twice or having small optimizations for each touch point; this is where the Microsoft Client Continuum offers some significant advantages over other solutions.

The client continuum uses .NET as the single skill, single toolset needed to create immersive client applications.

The continuum facilitates great User Experiences with tools that empower both designers and developers; these tools share a common declarative languages to represent UI and interactions.

The continuum thrives on reuse: skills reuse, tools reuse, and code reuse.

At MIX09, on the Silverlight and WPF front, we demonstrated the continuum a lot:

In Scott’s keynote, we showed an application we had used at a previous MIX to show hardware accelerated video and HLSL effects.
We showed it last year for WPF, and this year for Silverlight. The codebase was pretty much the same.
Jeff Wilcox had a session on “Sharing tools, skills and code in Silverlight and WPF”.
Karen Corby’s session on “Building Silverlight controls”, showed the same control she created in Silverlight running on WPF.
Our Expression Blend team, kept saying in all of their sessions, “all of these features work equally well in Silverlight and WPF”
Laurent Bugnion, from IdentityMine had a session called “Working across the .NET continuum”
Today, David Anson blogged how the Silverlight control Toolkit charts controls run fine on WPF.
Earlier today, I posted the same library of HLSL effects we use in WPF running in Silverlight

There were plenty other demonstrations of the continuum in action, and there are plenty more to come. One part that I really enjoyed at MIX was talking to a lot of customers, and partners, who are writing apps that span across the continuum.

For those wondering about the choice between WPF and Silverlight, keep the continuum in mind and rest assured you are not making the wrong decision with either technology.

For developers and designers, learning our continuum technologies is a great investment; you learn XAML and the tools once and you can reuse it across mobile, desktop, RIA, and Surface applications.
For businesses, you can prioritize for what you need today (desktop or RIA) and later on create the appropriate companion. Your skills, tools and code investments are preserved.

A few disclaimers on status today and future for the Continuum:

We are not done with the Continuum. If you want to share code, do plan ahead; be aware of the current platform differences, expect those to decrease quickly but don’t expect them to go away 100%, Silverlight will likely stay a subset of WPF (to keep it small and RIA optimized). MIX09 was a great step in the right direction, there are plenty of new features in SL3 that make the compatibility with WPF higher.
There will be more convergence on both sides. Both WPF and Silverlight will continue to grow and innovate on their scenarios, but on each release, each run-time should also pickup features that the other run-time added. WPF will pick up Silverlight features (like VSM or controls) and Silverlight will continue to add features from WPF.

Closing the series:
I think MIX09 was a great conference! The features and products announced are very exciting. Microsoft demonstrated strong innovation and adoption on the RIA space, and a strong commitment to User Experience and designer tools. Because MIX09 is a web conference, we shared our web message and this likely confused attendees on our commitment for WPF; the reality is that we are equally committed to WPF and Silverlight, because we need both technologies to deliver on our Client Continuum.

MIX09 Recap series part2 , what about WPF

jaimer — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:10:00 GMT

In between all the positive feedback at MIX, there was a lingering question that I read a lot on twits, blog posts, and heard at the Q&A from some sessions and I think we missed it during our planning; I felt it is one of those “we can not see the forest cause the trees are on the way” mistakes. Do you know what the question is??

Yes, it is “With Silverlight out of the browser, is WPF dead?” ..

Here is my personal take as a person who spends a lot of time with both of these teams and with customers using the technologies ( very often at the same time):

WPF and Silverlight address different scenarios and though they look alike, it is unlikely that in the short-term, one replaces the other.

The long answer is that the scenarios each technology addresses are different enough that they have conflictive requirements.
I see the choice between these two platforms as a trade-off between:

Size vs. Features
Full-trust (with native interop) vs. Secured or Sandboxed

Expanding even further:

Silverlight addresses our RIA needs. A good Rich Internet Application (RIA)run-time needs to be:

Cross-platform. This likely means the frameworks can’t become too exploitive of OS specific features and can’t integrate that well with the host OS. It is a lot of work to create a comprehensive application framework (like .NET) for cross-platform.
Easy to deploy and small in size. Web technology needs to install quickly, and with no risk of disrupting the desktop. When it comes to RIA frameworks, the trade-off between features and size is very tough. Compromises must be made when necessary (backing up my point that the framework is unlikely a full-desktop application replacement due to the size constraint).
Secured (or better yet, sandboxed). Internet software can’t be easily trusted because today there is no easy way to assign different trust levels across the internet. It is better to run sand-boxed so users are safe, than to put desktop at risk, so most RIA software is therefore sandboxed. This is critical to the success of RIAs!
You can ignore it and get lucky (for a little while) but I think it will eventually bite those that do ignore it. Microsoft has learned that lesson before, and we are not looking to compromise that again (ever?).
Faster and richer than any thing standards and web-based software (else why use it?).

WPF addresses our Windows (desktop) application needs. A good desktop application needs to be:

Exploitive. If it runs on a single OS, it better take advantage of it. Features like desktop and shell integration, drag & drop, hardware acceleration, etc. If the software runs on a platform that supports extended features like touch (in Windows7 or Surface), the app should embrace and support the features.
Comprehensive and Powerful. If the run-time is installed once, there is no reason for it not to be a full framework ( full 3D, media, documents, accessibility, storage and databases, a complete end-to-end framework that is not constrained by size).
Trusted, verifiable, and secured. If some one is installing software in their desktop, they should verify who it came from and then (if needed) trust it to do its job. If the application needs access to file system, devices, secure stores, sockets, etc. this is the choice you make at install time; the goal is to trust the application to do its job. You installed the client run-time for that reason. If needed, the run-time can do work to ‘constrain’ the application’s permissions (like Partial Trust). Apps should explicitly declare intent and the permissions they require to run.
Easy to deploy/Easy to update/configurable. I am not aiming for <30 seconds and < 5 MB download like a RIA run-time, but I have to admit Microsoft needs improvements on this. I am optimistic here:
- We recently added .NET 3.5 SP1 to Windows Update and hope that over time we get the majority of Windows boxes to 3.5 SP1.
- With .NET4 we deliver on the vision for client profile. It will be a 22 MB download, that runs side-by-side with all the other versions of .NET framework, so we will be able to use it on any box (not just clean XP like we have in Client profile with 3.5 SP1).
  I hope the two combined get us to desktop ubiquity so people can plan a .NET app with out worries about how to install the run-time.
Manageable. When we are talking desktop/enterprise software we quickly get into thousands of users, controlled versioning, policies, software is centrally distributed , etc.. Desktop software that is installed is easy to manage. RIA software that can be in caches, user stores, etc. is a bit harder.

Once you look at the above, it is easy to grasp why today, we do need multiple technologies to address both scenarios. Any one that tells you otherwise is heavily short changing you in one of these two scenarios (usually the desktop).

We do need to acknowledge that RIAs need stickiness, and off-line launching, and that is why Silverlight Out Of Browser was created, I call this scenario the “off-line RIA”; and it is very, very different from the “full-trust desktop app”.

Three more reasons to explain why WPF will be around for a long while:

WPF adoption is going well. We have a lot of partners doing WPF. If you went to PDC, we did a video with just a few of the partners doing WPF, it included Lenovo, HP, AMD, Autodesk, T-Online, Disney, Blockbuster, Roxio, SNCF, SAP, Terra, Cewe, and many others. These are the types of partners that use WPF to connect with millions of users. We have equal number of successes in the enterprise with partners who buy lots of Windows licenses and are very important to Microsoft. We are not walking away from that any time soon.

Inside Microsoft adoption is also strong; we see our business platform – the Dynamics team- using it; we have consumer apps like LifeCam and SongSmith, we have office apps like Semblio, our internal IT teams are using it, and our own development division is betting heavily on WPF to create Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend.

Announcement: Starting next Tuesday (seems like a good day for recurrent series) I will try to start a new “blog series” similar to Tim Sneath’s “Great WPF applications” series; I am not as eloquent as Tim, but I am happy to keep you on the loop on some of the great WPF apps out there. I don’t think we do enough of sharing those successes(again, trees blocking the forest).

We are investing into the platform. You did not see that at MIX because most of the announcements were at PDC and we are now in the middle of the .NET 4 release, but you can watch Kevin Gjertadt’s MIX session and hopefully get the message that:
- WPF will make the most important developer features in Windows 7 accessible to .NET developers. We are talking Touch!! that is not a small feature. We also have ribbon, taskbar, etc.
- We continue to improve the fundamentals. Performance and Text are good examples of significant investments in the .NET 4 time-frame.
- We thrive to improve deployment so every one can get full .NET Framework applications with much less friction. Details above.
WPF is the recommended UI stack in the .NET framework. There are a lot of people that need the full framework for their applications (Workflow, advanced Web services, encrypted stores, Office integration, parallelism, MEF, etc.) Silverlight is a high-fidelity subset of the framework, and it serves quite well all RIA needs, but we can’t cram the rest of the framework into Silverlight.

In closing, WPF will be around a while. One size does not fit all, today.

It is fair for MIX attendees to wonder about which one to choose, but that is mostly because MIX is a web conference. These attendees do need off-line, sandboxed RIAs and I am totally psyched that we are able to meet their needs.
For the other customers that need desktop applications that call native Win32 code, access to devices, or integration with desktop and office, then those customers will be able to use WPF.

The story on the WPF and Silverlight convergence is actually much better than this post discusses because here I aimed at explaining the different scenarios each addresses; stay tuned for Part 3 to discuss the synergies amongst Silverlight and WPF.

MIX09 recap series part 1, favorite features and announcements

jaimer — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:51:00 GMT

I am finally caught up with my family and work stuff , so I want to share my belated recap and my lessons learned from observing and talking to people at MIX09. Since it is a lot, I partitioned it into three posts:

Part1: Anything that inspired or excited me.
Part2: What we could have done (or messaged) better; future for our desktop client.
Part3: Our mission on the client space: The Microsoft Client Continuum.

Part 1: The good (or great)!

IMO, this was the best MIX to date. Microsoft was finally able to demonstrate and deliver the vision we have been thriving for in the last few years:

User Experience and designers were embraced throughout the conference (in part, by credible, recognized thought leaders from Microsoft).
- Bill Buxton and Deborah Adler keynotes were great.
- Expression Blend announced their upcoming features, with disruptive, rapid prototyping features like sketch flow, and strong improvements to the fundamentals with behaviors, design-time data, better import tools, and source control.
Internet Explorer 8 is a strong return back to the web standards world. It is compliant, more secure, fast enough, and innovative: IE8 brings safety and productivity to its users. I think we are back in the game (and just on time).
Silverlight 3 came really strong on all angles:
- We continue to innovate and lead on media.
- We are moving at warp speed to catch up to WPF around fundamentals (like element to element data binding, resources, etc.)
- We are moving towards the enterprise and already have a great set of features planned for the .NET RIA Services; this is the beginning of a great business platform.
- To every one’s surprise, we let the cat out of the browser (literally!)

My favorite features announced through out the conference:

Blend behaviors – yes, I know this is not even a new technology feature (we have been able to do them for a while) but I think official support in the tools and pre-canned behaviors in the platform will change how designers create interactivity in applications. Blend behaviors makes designers more productive and empowers them to do all the things that make me “miss” Triggers when I work on Silverlight. So I am psyched about behaviors.
To get familiar with behaviors you should:

Watch Pete Blois’ 20 minute session at MIX.
Look at the sample behaviors that Pete has released at Expression’s gallery.
Check out Kirupa’s walkthrough on behaviors.

Sketchflow – has the potential to change conceptual design and end-to-end designer workflow.
I like the direction on which this is going because it enabled rapid prototyping and potential reuse of these prototypes in the real app.

To get familiar with sketchflow, you must:
- Watch Christian Schormann’s Sketchflow session.
- Wait until ? for us to ship the preview. Sorry!
All the Silverlight improvements to get parity with WPF: Official support for Resource Dictionaries, Styling improvements, Element to Element binding, etc. I must say these are probably not crowd favorites either, but they are dear to me because I do write code that goes across both platforms, or often I find myself “missing” a feature that was not there in Silverlight; feature parity between both run-times makes it easier to port code and makes Silverlight better (against other competitors) so it helps us increase our user base.

To get familiar with these improvements, you need to
- Watch Joe Stegman’s “what’s new in SL3 features” session
- Watch Karen Corby’s session on controls.
H.264 Media on Silverlight
This one is big because it allows us to better serve content providers that had H264 format (mostly due to mobile) so I had to list, but I have mixed feelings here, I still hear ( and can see from videos I get ) that VC-1 is a better format. Still I am very excited about the possibilities these offers for us to work with new partners!

Don’t get me wrong, I was psyched about a lot more features than I mention above, but I had to pick a few top ones. If you want the list of other features that really excited me:

Silverlight Out of Browser – is very exciting, but I need to see what people do with it. I have to say it has the potential to be game changing in the long-run (as we grow it). I will come back to this one in part2 of the series stay tuned for that.
New import features in Blend. Being able to import Photoshop and illustrator sounds very, very good. I still need to capture feedback from partners on how good it is; if the quality is good, then this will also be game changing.
Perspective 3D in Silverlight. I am still curious where people take this feature too. I am sure it will be some where great and I will be looking silly for not saying it was game changing ;)

OK. that is a very high level of all the “Good stuff” .. I do have to give a “Thank You!” shout to the audience and partners that attended. For me and lots of other Microsoft folks, a huge part of MIX are the hallway and meals or party conversations. It is great to hear what we are doing right, wrong, and what we should do next.

I also have to throw a shout to the Deborah Adler keynote slot. What an inspiring story.

Stay tuned for part 2 and part 3 in the series!

MIME Types

jaimer — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 02:22:00 GMT

I often know I need a mime-type ( e.g. .deploy or .xaml ).. Extensions are easy, but the types are hard to remember ( application/octet-stream is my favorite guess )..

Now, courtesy of Chris Knowlton, Windows Media Server PM, I don't have to guess...

.323	text/h323
.aaf	application/octet-stream
.aca	application/octet-stream
.accdb	application/msaccess
.accde	application/msaccess
.accdt	application/msaccess
.acx	application/internet-property-stream
.afm	application/octet-stream
.ai	application/postscript
.aif	audio/x-aiff
.aifc	audio/aiff
.aiff	audio/aiff
.application	application/x-ms-application
.art	image/x-jg
.asd	application/octet-stream
.asf	video/x-ms-asf
.asi	application/octet-stream
.asm	text/plain
.asr	video/x-ms-asf
.asx	video/x-ms-asf
.atom	application/atom+xml
.au	audio/basic
.avi	video/x-msvideo
.axs	application/olescript
.bas	text/plain
.bcpio	application/x-bcpio
.bin	application/octet-stream
.bmp	image/bmp
.c	text/plain
.cab	application/octet-stream
.calx	application/vnd.ms-office.calx
.cat	application/vnd.ms-pki.seccat
.cdf	application/x-cdf
.chm	application/octet-stream
.class	application/x-java-applet
.clp	application/x-msclip
.cmx	image/x-cmx
.cnf	text/plain
.cod	image/cis-cod
.cpio	application/x-cpio
.cpp	text/plain
.crd	application/x-mscardfile
.crl	application/pkix-crl
.crt	application/x-x509-ca-cert
.csh	application/x-csh
.css	text/css
.csv	application/octet-stream
.cur	application/octet-stream
.dcr	application/x-director
.deploy	application/octet-stream
.der	application/x-x509-ca-cert
.dib	image/bmp
.dir	application/x-director
.disco	text/xml
.dll	application/x-msdownload
.dll.config	text/xml
.dlm	text/dlm
.doc	application/msword
.docm	application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12
.docx	application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
.dot	application/msword
.dotm	application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12
.dotx	application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template
.dsp	application/octet-stream
.dtd	text/xml
.dvi	application/x-dvi
.dwf	drawing/x-dwf
.dwp	application/octet-stream
.dxr	application/x-director
.eml	message/rfc822
.emz	application/octet-stream
.eot	application/octet-stream
.eps	application/postscript
.etx	text/x-setext
.evy	application/envoy
.exe	application/octet-stream
.exe.config	text/xml
.fdf	application/vnd.fdf
.fif	application/fractals
.fla	application/octet-stream
.flr	x-world/x-vrml
.flv	video/x-flv
.gif	image/gif
.gtar	application/x-gtar
.gz	application/x-gzip
.h	text/plain
.hdf	application/x-hdf
.hdml	text/x-hdml
.hhc	application/x-oleobject
.hhk	application/octet-stream
.hhp	application/octet-stream
.hlp	application/winhlp
.hqx	application/mac-binhex40
.hta	application/hta
.htc	text/x-component
.htm	text/html
.html	text/html
.htt	text/webviewhtml
.hxt	text/html
.ico	image/x-icon
.ics	application/octet-stream
.ief	image/ief
.iii	application/x-iphone
.inf	application/octet-stream
.ins	application/x-internet-signup
.isp	application/x-internet-signup
.IVF	video/x-ivf
.jar	application/java-archive
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WPF in Line of business applications ( aka "WPF DID GO to work")

jaimer — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:38:00 GMT

In a recent family trip, my brother-in-law hooked me up w/ a magazine for the long plane ride; it was Visual Studio Magazine with a "WPF Goes To Work" article in the cover. The article begins with a "Windows Presentation Foundation has been greatly underserved by Microsoft’s emphasis on glitz and glamour; learn how to take advantage of WPF in your everyday Windows business apps" ...

Picture me sitting on a 4 hour plane ride, with that opener, I went through all the emotions ( in order):

"Kathleen is right" ...
"should blame it on marketing (sorry guys), WPF was a Vista feature and Vista had a very strong consumer focus" ...
".. I am part of the problem since we could have shared our success stories, given that the internal perception is that WPF has been more successful in Line Of Business than we initially predicted ( given it shipped before the tools, etc.)
"Well, the story is not as simple.. there are choices to be made, and this new platform despite all its goodness needs to be explained" -- it is like a hybrid car, we all agree it is good, it is the future, yet it is not cost effective or practical for every one to get one..

Eventually, I decided all of these answers are partially right... so I scribbled my opinions on these topics

Not much I can say about Kathleen been right; but I do recommend the article. Kathleen shares her personal experiences, uses concise examples and features to illustrate her points and it it obvious she gets client application development.
Evidence -- there are some great case studies that show what enterprises are doing with WPF; I kept it pure, with just URLs so you can hear it from the customers.
The why and where distills a few of the reasons I heard over and over from real customers when they were asking to be early adopters for the technologies; back then it was risky, we had no books, we had no tools, fortunately for most of them the bets paid off...
My version on "do I need WPF?" ... which I hoped would help people with the highest level guidance on choosing a technology (in particular the Windows Forms vs. WPF dilemma).

On all of the above, I need to disclaim a couple things:

The list is not all inclusive; I do feel bad about that.. there are many more I can't talk about since we don't have PR agreements or I did not have a URL handy, but I do think the list is representative.
The opinions and experiences you are reading are MINE and not all of Microsoft's; the good news is I was there for most of these; I was lucky to be involved on a lot of these projects so the insights come from my interpretations on working with Microsoft field, customers ( business and devs) and partners..
I tried to be fair and accurate on the project's results, but on the advise I did extrapolate to today { meaning I did take into account that the platform and most importantly the tools have evolved and improved, so it is less painful today with Blend2 than 2 years ago when some of these projects started} ..

Interesting posts for week of 6/4 to 6/10 ...

jaimer — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 08:12:00 GMT

I traveled most of the week so did not blog ... from the blogs, I read here are some of my 'faves' for the week..

Glenn Plock shares details on the future or Smart Client Software factory and migration to Acropolis
Jon galloway shares his thoughts on SVG and XAML ...
Only addition to his thoughts/concerns would be that it is very doable to use Illustrator to get to XAML ...Illustrator has a free 30 day trial.. Once in illustrator, not only try the plug-in to export... you can also try opening the ai file with Expression Design... and exporting the xaml from there... I have great results lately with Design's capability to read AI and export as xaml.
{note: expression design also has a 30 day trial, this whole thing is still free}
Free designer training ( Blend and Design ) from lynda.com ... Tim has the details..
Dwayne blogged about HostVisual and creating non-interactive WPF UI in background threads ... good stuff, I subscribed to his blog in hopes he continues to post..
Microsoft User eXperience Evangelist (UXEs) are aggregating their blog at http://design-for-innovation.com/ ... These are sharp designers who know a lot about user experience; though the aggregation is still in the works , it might be worth keeping an eye on it ..
Peggi wrote the most complete article in writing a WIC enabled codec. I worked with an ISV that wrote a WIC Codec for their Vista version of their software; they were quite happy with the 'benefits' ... which Peggi summarizes much better than I ever would:
"Building your CODEC on the Windows Imaging Component platform makes it possible for all applications built on WIC to get the same platform support for your image format as they get for the common image formats shipped with the platform. It also enables the Windows Vista Photo Gallery, Explorer, and Photo Viewer to display thumbnails and previews of images in your format using the decoder that you provide. For Raw formats, it enables more sophisticated imaging applications to take advantage of your decoder's Raw processing capabilities. Depending on the encoder options you support, you can also expose unique capabilities of your encoder to enable applications to take full advantage of the advanced features of your image format" ...
[FYI, WPF is built on WIC, so once you have the codec you will be able to open your custom image format with an <Image Source=".. " /> tag ...]

Cool stuff I heard about :

BBC is using Photosynth 3D to create a show .. has good links to photosynth stuff..
Darren David (ex-Fluid, Northface kiosk extraordinaire) talks about a very impressive WPF app he worked on ..
He mentions the challenge of Multi-input UI ... which the Surface team have solved for their platform ... I wonder if Microsoft will ever expose the implementation for use outside of Surface??

[Movies]

I watched Hannibal rising on the plane from NY to seattle ( my hands cramp if I type on plane) ... fell asleep.. the first 15 mins were interesting cause it explained the 'why?' ... the rest was gory fill-time..
I went to theater for "Ocean's 13" ... I was a fan of Ocean's 11 so I had to go see this one.. Though I laughed a few times, quite a bit of the movie was a little too far fetched for me ... I wish I had waited for video instead of theater..

Acropolis CTP1 released to web...

jaimer — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 06:09:00 GMT

Acropolis is a set of components and tools (add-ins to Visual Studio) to help you build smart client applications..
To check out and download acropolis, you can go here. There is also a 12 min video there

Just a few immediate thoughts on what excites me about acropolis:

Framework-like features for building WPF LOB applications.

You get good structure out of the box -- hopefully leading to good architecture.
You get code out of the box (e.g. a Doc/View like we did in MFC) so you can focus on functionality instead of wiring File->Open ..

Toolability

So far, we have had great success with developer/designer collaboration between Blend and VS; now with Acropolis we show framework-like toolability for XAML as well as WPF's rich extensibility. {arguably that was proven with the

Acropolis shows our continued 'client investment'; in the midst of all this RIA buzz we have seen lately, Acropolis is a good reminder that for certain apps, a smart client architecture is still the best option.. don't compromise on experience if you don't have to..
The 'architecture decisions' they have made have been outstanding..

Though they target and are optimized for Windows Presentation Foundation, they are presentation agnostic, so you could possibly create or reuse a Windows Forms User Interface application and reused the business components.
Skinning, Theming, Databinding, Commanding.. All of the UI goodness we have seen as clients evolve come together in acropolis...

It has a cool codename ..

[Some of you might know Acropolis as an productization and WPF implementation of the Composite Application Block released by our Patterns & Practices team.. You are right, it is all that and a bag of chips... If you are a CAB user, no worries, the P&P team will release migration guidance to move to Acropolis. ]

Lastly, there are several sessions for Acroplis at TechEd; be sure to look for them...
Kathy Kam and David Hill are the speakers... If you are at TechEd and want to hook up with them, drop an email w/ your contact info and I can pass it along.. else, provide feedback in the forums or their blogs: Kathy , David's blog ..

I will get back to Acropolis soon - traveling this week..

[PS -- Claiming a Technorati Profile. maybe that will force/encourage me to blog a little more..
I got the 'blogging for dummies book' last week but have not read it, I have been hooked on Javascript Definitive Guide and it is a long, but very good one] ..

Astoria: data services for the web..

jaimer — Wed, 09 May 2007 23:47:00 GMT

This was one of several projects that did not surface much at MIX due to the silverlight hype.. I have gotten a few questions around it this week... so I thought I would at least share useful pointers:
My interpretation: Astoria is a set of Data Services that exposes data via URIs over HTTP. Astoria serializes the data to JSON (or to XML) and it leverages the Entity framework for quick creation of the object model ..

MIX session (from sessions.visitmix.com, XD006)
Pablo's blog .. definitely a better place to ask questions..
Channel 9 video -- quite similar to MIX session but has white board.. you can watch one or the other .. I think MIX might be longer and more complete..

My initial random thoughts :
Pros:

I love the simple/uniform way to access data.. Does not get much simpler than URIs .. [that part is brilliant]
I can think of scenarios where discoverability of data is a desire and this would be ideal ... his example in the MIX demo of Encarta is a top match ... Any thing with a catalog is likely a good match..
I am also liking the potential perf possiblities of the model (so simple it is likely good perf, and it does run on top of WCF).. also caching of data is likely easy since these are standard URLs..

My early cons [some of it are going away as I think more about them] :

I am still a SOAP believer (for B2B) ... I think advanced web services are critical to the evolution of enterprise web .. fading a little for consumer scenarios, I would have to be a fool not to acknowledge that REST is strong and AJAX is making JSON a strong format for end-user scenarios... Also, Astoria is based on a WCF web service, so potentially the higher level goodness can be
This reminded me of when SQL exposed webservices directly -- imho a feature not widely adopted - but after looking at the extensiblity/customization I actually re-considered... you could build on this and keep the simplicity of the URI navigation pattern..but plugging business rules along the way ...

My first conclusion, I am keeping an eye on it it and will definitely consider it for rapid silverlight prototypes .. I think it could save me time . :)
I would also like to know a lot more about the WCF aspect of this .. Could we bolt-on WCF higher level features on top of this?... My guess is yes but it is just a guess..

Your thoughts?

Desktop matters conference report ..

jaimer — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:28:00 GMT

Tim Sneath ( my work boss) emailed me asking how it went , and since I am typing if for my team I thought: "what the heck ... just publish it..."

I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at Desktop Matters last Friday .. It is the "hard-corest" Java conference I have ever attended (disclaimer, I have only attended 2 java conferences: JavaOne and OSCON) ... The conference focuses on client java technologies, a lot of people from Sun's Java2D and Swing team presented.. Also, some influentials building interesting java stuff..

Here are my thoughts:

On the conference:
it was awesome... A small group of Java influentials talking with the Java leaders (Hans Muller, Chet Haase, Richard Bair, etc.) .. there was nothing held back either direction.. The Sun team shared challenges and road-map... the community provided good feedback.. I had a blast and learned a lot ... Read some of their reports here..
The event reminded me of what at Microsoft we call Software Design Reviews ( SDRs ) ... Some of you reading this post might have attended one of these ... You know that it is hard to buy that kind of access, well on the Java client community you might have the answer in this conference..
A nice touch different from the SDR was Ben Galbraith the organizer who kept it light .. making equal fun of every one there

On Java SE and Swing:
I was surprised and (as a technologist) happy to see progress on java and Swing ; their 'filthy rich' demos looked pretty good ; That said, I still think they are very far behind Microsoft (both Windows forms but specially WPF) in tooling, customization, richness, etc.. You can definitely do good stuff on Java, if you are willing to write a bit of code or hire experienced devs.. [yes, I of course acknowledge they do it for the cross-platform promise.. if you must go x-platform and can't go AJAX, I think that is one of the best choices out there]

On my presentation/message:
When I arrived, I had a deck with 40 slides covering the ins of WPF ( templates, styles, resources, etc.) by the second day I had changed it based on a private conversation with Hans Muller - I pitched him on XAML and he seemed overwhelmed with properties, triggers, styles, etc.. but he really got the "oh, makes better tools" idea..

So, in the end, I presented a simple (much slower-paced ):

Why is MS doing WPF..? It is ALL about User Experience; I elaborated that UX is business value to the everyone.
On day 1, the Java folks listed why write client software and the list was usability, richness, performance, leverage local resources, etc.. most of these are factors of user experience.. so it resonated..
UX is also business value for the Dev/ISV/SI selling the solution... It provides differentiation opportunity, branding, pride of ownership, etc.
How is MS we improving UX with WPF?
1. Integration of all our UI Stacks ( Text, 2D, 3D, Video, etc.)
2. Declaratively; we invested in a declarative model to optimize toolability and fully incorporate the designer role into application development .. this is the silver bullet in the long-run; along with rich services to embrace the declarative modell...
What are we doing on x-platform?
(IMHO) WPF/E is a huge step for Microsoft. Not because of what we are delivering in Version1, but because it is a commitment to innovate in client software that runs x-platform. MS is best positioned [we have the framework, WPF, XAML, etc. to act quickly in that space, since we have a lot of the lessons learned - and the code ;)

I did two demos:

The Healthcare demo I was short on time and wanted to keep it focused -- check for a post on that demo later today or tomorrow there is some good news there--.. I think this summarizes well WPF integration since it shows most UI stacks..
I spend 15 to 20 mins in Expression blend building stuff from scratch ;

created the data templates for the healthcare demo ... and
created a 3D button with animation ( triggers on mouse over) ... the latter was mostly to make explain how we compare to Chet's animation engine for his book...

The feedback
I was very surprised on the 'kudos' ... Quite a few people came to me afterwards and shared kind thoughts... I got a lot of "I get your experience message"; and "I love what WPF can do", "XAML seems very neat", etc..

My best two take aways...

An interesting cross-platform combo in the interim? :
While sitting there listening to their challenges, goals, etc. and after receiving the feedback on my presentation I was thinking... what if "XAML was a standard" and the Java community embraced it to create UI? .... They could keep their performant cross platform engine .. but use our tooling to create rich apps" .... does it sound crazy?? I think it is a good interim while MS gets a strong x-platform client out (if we ever do, I can't confirm nor deny, only hope )... The type of apps these folks are writing requires rich development frameworks, rich programming languages, and powerful drawing engines... I can't think of a good solution for that today if you include a good tooling/debug story.
Some lower hanging, more realistic takeaway for Microsoft:
I think we need to re-visit simple styles and create several "cool" versions of simple styles... We have the designer tools.. but there will be teams out there that do not have designers.. We need to pony up for a few good design templates that developers can use to create "cool looking apps" with out a lot of designer support... If MS provides styled primitives then developers could put screens build on these simple styled controls... For example, I recently downloaded the "Roxio" client, nice gradients, stylish controls, yet nothing extreme (other than a few cool vector graphics that could have been images) .. I think with "cool simple styles" this could be accomplish with out much design work...

That is it ... I hope the conference repeats next year .... If it does, I would recommend it if you are a Java client developer ...
I also hope I don't get fired for a post w/ the word java so much ... My first test to see how far I can take it ....

Choosing a smart client technology..

jaimer — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:10:00 GMT

Help us out .. Kevin Moore (wpf) , Scott Morrison (crossbow ) and I were guessing some of the criteria that you use to select a platform .. we are making two assumptions: 1) you want a windows smart client .. 2) and you are considering managed code ( so windows forms or wpf mostly)

Here is where we are landing ( and criteria range or explanation ) ...

Platform ( supported OSes )
Richness ( battle ship gray to bling )
Tools ( from notepad to drag-drop-databinding-codegen-magic-wand )
Controls ( from button to datagrids, is datagrid the richest control that is fair )
Ecosystem ( measure of existance for: books, community, control vendors?)
Frameworks existence of app blocks to accelerate app dev ( like MDI, CAB, Spring)
Future investments for the platform ... (e.g. how much will it change and why?? )
Existing investments ( your skills, your code )

some that are not making the cut are: deployment (seems the same), platform lifespan ( seems the same too.. both will ship in Orcas so both have 10+ years to go..)

Some of what I am wondering:

What are we missing??

Localization ... is it that relevant... At MS it is... but outside?
Help system ..
Extensibility? Customization?
What else??

Are the scales above fair or too broad? I am mosty concerned on richness... was thinking of splitting it to

Basic UI services (layout, controls, customization, )
app services ( databinding , performance, back-end integration ) ....
Technolgies integrated ( e.g. support for text, 3d, etc.)
But when I partition like this seems too granular .. and wpf focused..

Thoughts?? I will let you know where we land ... this is for a deck next wednesday ... and we are all too swamped (so none has a lot of think time), drop me an email with what we are missing ... else we might miss it for next week )..

Cheers..