Category Archives: Events

[PDC10] WPF vNext

Events, WPF, ,

Day 1 of PDC 2010 is now over and I had the chance to watch the “WPF vNext” session by Rob Relyea. You can follow this link if you want to watch the video on-demand.

History

Rob starts with an history of Microsoft products from Windows 95 and IE 1.0…

The Blend team was created to build tools that would meet developers and designers needs. They worked closely with the Avalon team (codename for WPF) to make sure the platform was adequate and toolable.

Then the Cider team started their work in order to have a good integration in Visual Studio.

At this point, .Net 3.0 hasn’t shipped yet (it was in 2006), but Microsoft already has the vision of having XAML-based technology in the browser (with what would become Silverlight) and on the phone.

Silverlight & WPF

Silverlight

  • focuses on premium media experiences and business applications
  • suitable for most other types of application

WPF

  • complex ISV (Independent Software Vendors) applications
  • key scenarios includes DX and Hwnd interop

Convergence

  • bringing key features of WPF into Silverlight
  • WPF will support Silverlight hosting in the next version

ISV needs

  • great Windows applications
  • modern UI
  • seamless integration
  • rich content

Microsoft adoption of WPF

  • Visual Studio 2010
  • Expression Studio
  • Web Matrix
  • Powershell ISE
  • more to announce from Microsoft, but not during this PDC…

WPF vNext

  • integration of the Ribbon in WPF
  • improved collections handling in background thread (simplify the problem related to the UI thread)
  • improved UI virtualizing and grouping (right now virtualization is disabled as soon as you group data in an ItemsControl)
  • seamless integration: new SilverlightHost control (so we’ll be able to have DeepZoom in WPF !)
  • hwnd-based will no longer have airspace problem (for example, a Winforms control is always rendered on top of all other WPF controls).

As a conclusion, it’s good to see Microsoft finally giving some information about the future of WPF. The most important part I guess is to understand that Microsoft is still doing improvements on WPF and positioning WPF as the key technology for building apps with modern UI on Windows. We might have more and more applications switching to Silverlight but I’m sure they are still a lot of need for a technology like WPF which can use the whole power of the Windows OS (wheter it’s interop with native code, DirectX or other technologies).

For more information, you can also check-out a blog post from Pete Brown entitled “The Present and Future of WPF“.

Tap N Match a cool WP7 game ! Vote on Facebook !

Events, Silverlight, Windows Phone, ,

Today I need help from all my readers across the globe ! Please vote for our TapNMatch WP7 game here

Microsoft France is organizing since a couple of months a Windows Phone 7 contest in order to create cool applications. Applications are demonstrated using a short video which is posted on Facebook. The goal is to have the maximum number of “Like” in order to be selected for the final.10 applications are going to be selected, and on October 7th, each selected developers will have to present very quickly (2min) its application in front of an amazing jury made of Steve Ballmer and CEOs of french companies.

A coworker and I have been working on a Windows Phone 7 game called Tap N Match created using Silverlight. The goal of the game is to associate “targets” which have a number either by creating pairs (5;5) or sequences (1;2). Here is quick description of the game:

  • best scores are recorded in the cloud using Windows Azure
  • use of the Bing APIs in order to determine the country of the player when posting a new score
  • use of the Pivot control

Here is the presentation of our application on YouTube:

In order to vote for our application:

  1. Go to : http://www.facebook.com/Developpeurs.net
  2. “Like” this page
  3. Go to the video of my game : http://www.facebook.com/Developpeurs.net#!/video/video.php?v=434150728926
  4. “Like” my video 🙂

Thank you very much for your help !

MSDN Ultimate Subscription Giveaway

.Net, Events, Silverlight, Visual Studio, Windows Phone
IMG_0833 As a Microsoft MVP for this year, I got 3 MSDN Ultimate Subscriptions to share with friends and co-workers. I already gave 2 of them to co-workers and I’d like to offer the last one to one of my reader !

The “official” pricing for the MSDN Ultimate Subscription is $11,899. The subscription is valid one year and is not restricted to US only. The MSDN Ultimate has the following items (among many others – you can see the detailed list here):

  • Windows Azure Platform
  • Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
  • Visual Studio TFS 2010
  • Expression Studio Ultimate
  • Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008
  • Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, Project Professional 2010, Visio Premium 2010

In order to take your chance to get this subscription:

  • let a comment on this blog post
  • explain what you would like to do with the subscription
  • share you blog address, community website or whatever to show how you’re involved in the .Net community

Contest is now over. The winner of the MSDN Ultimate License is Mike Strobel. Thank you all for letting a comment, I which I had more subscriptions to giveaway…