Tag Archives: mix09

The future of WPF at Mix09

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mix09

MIX09 is now over and the good news is that we can watch all sessions that have been recorded online !

I didn’t have time yet to watch all sessions I’m interested in, but I already saw “What”s new in WPF 4” video (available here).

Here are the important points of this session regarding the future of WPF:

  • Lot of new things are coming in WPF4: Text clarity improved, Multi-touch, Windows7 integration, Ribbon control, Focus management improvements, Visual State Manager, Client profile, Themes, Chart controls and a lot of bug fixes…
  • WPF4 will come together with .Net4 which brings its own set of cool new stuff: Dynamic Language, MEF, F#, parallel library
  • WPF will be the best choise for RAD under Windows7: Multi-touch, Taskbar integration, Ribbon, Common dialogs, File explorer customization…
  • Multi-touch support: UIElement changes to manage touch related events, touch support is added for some controls (ScrollViewer)
  • New composition API: developers can control graphical elements cached in video memory
  • Controls that are currently available in the WPF toolkit will be integrated into the platform (DataGrid, DatePicker…) – moreover an update of the toolkit has just been released
  • Developers tools are improved: VS2010 and Blend3 helps the usage of WPF (databinding support…)
  • .Net4 will come with a new XAML parser: faster, extensible, public API to manage BAML format
  • .Net4 XAML language has new XAML features: support for generics, better references by name

I hope will see a CTP soon so that we’ll start playing with those new features 🙂

First look at Expression Blend 3 !

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mix09

The keynote at MIX09 is almost over and Expression Blend 3 has been announced !

Go ahead and grab this new version from the Microsoft Expression web site.

A video is also already available on Channel9, where Unni Ravindranathan takes on a tour to demonstrate the new features of Blend 3. I just finished watching the show and here are my notes:

  • Blend3 supports Silverlight3 but there is more than that: lot of new functionalities to improve the user experience and the productivity
  • Goal: be more creative inside the tool
  • In Blend2, it was sort of complicated to select objects, particularly with nested containers. With Blend3 it’s a lot easier, we no longer have to navigate inside the objects explorer. Just click and you’re done
  • New features to manipulate the gradients : we can manipulate the gradient stops directly from the artboard
  • Supports for shaders : the assets panel now contains a “shader” category – drag’n’drop on the artboard and you’re done
  • Supports for projections in Silverlight3, new category from the property grid to edit them
  • Import from Photoshot and Illustrator functionality !
  • XAML Intellisense (oh my god !)
  • Team Foundation Server support
  • Sample data source generation inside Blend3 (Blend is able to generate sample data such as texts and images)
  • New features: behaviours that can be drag’n’dropped from the assets panel on the artboard to attach a piece of code to a visual element (could be used to start an animation for example)
  • Easing functionality when working with animation: define elastic, cubic, exponential animations (I think designers are going to have some fun)
  • New extensibility points to the Editor: custom adorners, custom panels, extend property grid, etc.

Here are some screenshots I just took running the preview on my machine. I think Blend3 is going a major step forward in the Expression Studio 3. Don’t wait a second to play with it !

welcome

Welcome to Blend3 !

assets

The new assets panel

animations

Easing functionality

intellisense4

XAML Intellisense !

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