In with the new
It’s official – the first Customer Technology Preview of “WPF/E” has been released. To get started, you’ll need to install the small runtime (plug-in) using one of these links: [Windows] [Apple OS X]. For next steps, you can download the SDK which includes samples, docs and a Visual Studio 2005 project template. Note that the samples and docs are also available online. For questions, comments, feedback, please use the “WPF/E” MSDN Forums. Also, you can check out “live” use of “WPF/E” at the Channel 9 playground.
Note for those trying the links shortly after 9 AM PST today, you may need to give them time to propagate.
As part of this step forward, I’d like to take a quick step back. A year ago, “WPF/E” was just a concept that grew out of customer need for a rich web solution that was synergistic with Microsoft technologies. Today we released the first preview of that technology and while it’s a big step in only a year, we still have work to do. As we move forward, my focus will be less on what works for people and more on what doesn’t work or what’s missing. We are committed to building the right solution for customers and in order to do that we have to understand and ease pain points. As a product that’s only been in development for a year there will be some shortcomings and I want to hear about them. Internally, our development process is agile (yet another variant of SCRUM). As such, we have short milestones centered on enabling new customer scenarios. Our next milestone is scheduled for February 2007 and the feature set for this is in development and mostly fixed. The milestone after that will be driven largely by customer feedback coming from conversations with customers as well as looking at the main pain points we are seeing in our forums or posted in comments on team blogs or external blogs. So please, send us your feedback – not only will we listen but we’ll work in an agile way to get those features delivered as quickly as possible.
