Jared Bienz's Blog : Acropolis

0 Failed, 0 Skipped

jbienz — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:28:30 GMT

Build succeeded.

Time Elapsed 00:00:01.44
========== Rebuild All: 2 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========

I don't know about you, but it's amazing to me how much joy a couple lines of ASCII can bring. Transitionals compiles!

I've arrived in Florida and even though I didn’t leave Houston until after 9 PM last night, I accomplished so many things on the flight. I got the Transition classes separated from the rest of the Acropolis source and got them compiling on their own. I also changed the namespaces up just a little bit since this Transitionals is now a solution in its own right.

The only changes are as follows:

Transitions live in Transitionals.Transitions
The TransitionElement control for presenting transitions lives in Transitionals.Controls

I’d also like to add a few more transition related controls to the project before I go live. For example, in the old Acropolis days I had a cool DataTemplate based slideshow control that I think might be cool to include.

Before the flight was over I even had time to get my Transition Tester project up and running against the new library and the new namespaces. This project is coming along quite nicely.

Things still left to do:

I need to remove the copyright message from the source files that came from Acropolis and replace them with the standard Ms-PL license. I actually wrote a tool that can search for a License region and update or inject it if it’s not found into each C# and XAML file. I’ll use that to get this part done.

I need to decide which controls I want to include. I also need to decide if I want to split the SlideShow control out into a base control without automatic navigation and a derived SlideShow that has the timers. Of course, the timers can always be turned off for manual navigation (and I think that’s already the default).

Journey to the Source

jbienz — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:27:44 GMT

Getting access to Microsoft source code is (not surprisingly) a long and arduous process. Actually, the tools for requesting access and tracking your pending approvals isn't bad at all. There's just a bit of red tape that your request has to go through. It's one thing if you're a Redmond employee working in a product group. It's another thing if your a field guy wanting to expose some source to the community. None the less, tonight I've proven it's not impossible.

It seems like almost the minute I managed to get the source downloaded from the repository David also sent it over to me in a zip file. Geez, if I'd just been more patient I could have bypassed all that trouble. Still, I don't want to be bugging David going forward and this was the more official way to get at the bits.

I've got a two hour flight from Houston to Tampa Sunday night. I hope to get the bits extracted and compiling by the end of the flight, but I realize that's probably a lofty goal.

The birth of Transitionals

jbienz — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 08:22:12 GMT

So I’m up here in Redmond at TechReady. It’s a super secret event that we get to go to once a year and learn about the cool things the product groups have been up to.

This year I'm learning about Prism, which is a cool lightweight framework for building composite applications in WPF. No, it's not CAB.Next and no it's not Acropolis reborn. Still, developers of these frameworks should find themselves at home. Prism is different and Prism is cool, but I'll leave it up to that team to talk more about their baby when they're ready.

As I've been sitting through talks about Prism, CAB, smart clients and RIA, I can't help but think back to some of the cool things Acropolis did for us. One feature that comes to mind is the Transition framework. It allowed views to be swapped in and out of a shared workspace in an animated fashion, like switching between video rolls in a professional editing application.

When the Acropolis research project was discontinued I was asked by a couple of my ISVs how they might go about implementing their own transition framework. At the time, all I could recommend was that they use Relfector to take a look at what was done. Or look to another solution for transitions (like what's available in the Syndicated Client SDK). I always hoped that the Transition framework would be rolled forward into another product, but as I sat here in Redmond listening to these talks I started to realize that this cool little feature was nowhere to be found. So I decided it's time to take action.

I've had the pleasure of meeting Scott Guthrie in person before, last year at Mix. And just like many of you I follow his blog to learn about cool new things in .Net 3.5, Silverlight, WPF and the like. But this week he presented to us in person and I took the opportunity to go up afterward and say hi.

I first thanked him for all that he does and let him know what a valuable resource his blog has been to me. Then I brought up the Acropolis transitions and immediately proposed an Open Source project on CodePlex. It took less than two seconds for him to reply and to my pleasant surprise, he said he thought it was a great idea! He even offered for me to get back in touch with him if I needed any help making it happen. I was stunned.

Next I reached out to Brad Abrams. Back in October I had a chance to do a webcast with him on WPF and at the time he was also overseeing Acropolis. Again I was shocked with an almost immediate and emphatic response in support of the effort. In fact, Brad's already put me in touch with David Hill to start working on getting access to the source.

Could things really be this easy...? I know, I shouldn't ask that out loud.