Wonderous Windows Forms
Howdy there ...
My name is Jeff Chrisope, and I am one of the hordes of Microsoft Program Managers working on the Whidbey (aka Visual Studio 2005) release of Windows Forms. Notice that I didn't say I work on the "Windows Forms team", because that's oh-so v1.0. For reasons both complicated and boring, the team itself is called the ".NET Client team" -- though nobody internally calls us that, so you don't have to, either.
Okay, enough of THAT.
I've been in and around the .NET Framework team since it became that, in various capacities. Over the last couple of years I've been working exclusively on Windows Forms, owning a diverse set of features including:
- In-situ property editing
- "Action" Smart Tags (ala Office)
- Property Grid improvements
- Layout features
- Client settings
- Random grab-bag of other stuff
Sound like fun? Well, it has been fun, very much so, for the most part. Lots of smart people here, lots of good thinking ... but also often quite a tight schedule, which can lead to sadness and despair when it comes to getting a cool feature ready to ship. I say all this because half - and I do mean fully half - of the features listed above will not see the light of day in Whidbey.
"Whoa, huh?" you may ask. Indeed. Want to learn more details? You'll have to wait ... for the feature series of blog blathering entitled "Death of a Feature".
But on a more positive note, I'll START with a different series of blog blathering, which I'll call "Name That Layout". The various new layout features in Whidbey - AutoSize, TableLayoutPanel, FlowLayoutPanel, plus some bonus gizmos and thingamajigs - are very powerful and can be used in a variety of scenarios ... but it's not always immediately clear how to get from start to finish with a given layout. Too many knobs, not enough time. So ... this series will be around me (like all good blogs) presenting a set of dialogs as a "quiz", then seeing how y'all get along with creating that form using the layout tools in Whidbey. Rules next time.
So stay tuned - more lessons about life, love, and Whidbey rich client development just around the corner ...
