Category Archives: WPF

An history of 11 years of XAML stacks

.Net, General, Silverlight, Windows 8, Windows Phone, WinRT, WPF

Today I’m releasing something I’m quite excited about… I call it the XAML timeline !

It’s an interactive history of 11 years of XAML development at Microsoft, from a .Net developer point of view (me!). Remember Avalon ? Longhorn ?

Feel free to click on the following picture to open the timeline in a new tab:

xaml-timeline

The web page has a few interesting things under the hood:

Feel free to drop a comment and share your thoughts !

 

 

MVVM framework explorer updated !

.Net, Silverlight, Windows 8, Windows Phone, WPF, , ,

After several requests, I finally took the time to update my MVVM Explorer Silverlight App !

Here is the changelog:

  • update all download stats (based ONLY on CodePlex stats)
  • refresh popularities
  • remove StructuredMVVM (not available on CodePlex)
  • add WinRT support (however, no toolkit seems to support if official yet)
Top 5 (most downloaded & supporting WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone):
  1. MVVM Light (95k downloads)
  2. Caliburn Micro (27k downloads)
  3. nRoute (22k downloads)
  4. Simple MVVM toolkit (10k downloads)
  5. Catel (8k downloads)

As always, feedbacks are welcome !

Windows Phone vNext & Windows 8 next week

.Net, Events, Silverlight, Visual Studio, Windows 8, Windows Phone, WPF

Update 26th 7:37PM: Nokia keynote live tomorrow morning at 8:30 CET. Live webcast here: http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/webcast-mwc/webcast/

The coming week should be pretty interesting for any folks interested in Microsoft technologies. The Mobile World Congress will take place in Barcelona from Monday to Friday.

Windows Phone

On the mobile space, we can expect first official information about Windows Phone Tango. Tango is expected to be a version of the OS dedicated to low-end devices. From the various leaks that occurred in the last weeks we already have some ideas of what Tango might look likes:

  • ability to import and export contacts directly from the SIM card
  • ability to send multiple images in a single MMS
  • more languages supported (120, whereas Mango supports “only” 35)
  • ability to run on devices with only 256MB or RAM
None of those information have been confirmed yet but it’s only a matter of hours now 🙂
Of course in the Windows Phone world, the next big step will be Apollo. Apollo is expected to be the next major version of the Windows Phone platform. At this point, we don’t know if Microsoft is going to talk about Apollo during MWC.
After a leak about Apollo, Paul Thurrot wrote an article describing various aspects of this new version. Here are some expected features:
  • support for multi-core processors, new screen resolutions & NFC support
  • shared components with Windows 8 (this brings a lot of question: are we talking about WinRT for example ?)
  • app-to-app communication (similar to what is available in Windows 8 )
  • IE10
  • SkyDrive & Skype integration
Again, none of those information have been confirmed yet. We will see if MWC brings more answers.

Windows 8

On wednesday 29th Microsoft will hold a special event in Barcelona for the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

The Consumer Preview will be available for download to anybody and should be feature complete. I’m expecting a lot from this release as the Developer Preview was quite incomplete regarding XAML development (for example Blend was only able to target HTML WinRT projects).

Visual Studio 11

With the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Microsoft confirmed this week that we are also going to have access to Visual Studio 11.

Visual Studio 11 will include most of the extensions currently available in the Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2010. The XAML designer will be shared with Blend (hopefully that we will to better performance & less design-time issues). There are tons of other changes, improvements and new features…

For more details, you can check out those posts: Introducing the new developer experience part 1 & part 2.

Of course I’ll try to play with all those new toys as soon as possible. So you should expect more blog post this week !