Introducing "Cider" - The Visual Studio Designer for WPF ("Avalon")
Via our friends at ActiveWin, a recently posted episode of MSDN TV features Mark Boulter and Mike Harsh giving an overview of "Cider," the visual designer for Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code-named "Avalon") that will be part of a future version of Visual Studio. The 13-minute presentation includes a 10-minute demo where Mike shows the creation of a small media application within Visual Studio that is then opened and styled in "Sparkle" Interactive Designer that is subsequently round-tripped back into Visual Studio for final coding. Imagine what can be created when the workflow between a professional designer and an application developer is this seamless. I can hardly wait!
This short demonstration also features early work by Infragistics on the NetAdvantage DataPresenter control that they showed at PDC05. It's an amazing control, and I encourage you to try it out. Or, if you'd rather just watch a video of what can be quickly created with the control, check out their Show Off video submission.
There's also a 43-minute Channel 9 interview with Mark Boulter and Brian Pepin where they talk more about and demonstrate the "Cider" and "Sparkle" tools. If you're still craving more (and what hungry developer wouldn't?), there are a number of PDC05 sessions that should interest you; specifically: TLN213, TLN319, TLNL03, and TLNL10.
