Tag Archives: vs2010

Review of 2009 blog posts

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In the past year, I’ve posted more than 30 articles on my blog. Here is a summary of those posts (link in bold are those which got the most traffic during the year). Obviously, MVVM was a very hot topic during 2009 🙂

January

February

March

April

May

July

August

September

October

November

Discover and compare existing MVVM frameworks !

2010 roadmap

General, ,

I wish a happy new year to all my readers across the web. I thank you for all the feedback I got during the past year and I hope we will be able to exchange more in 2010. In this post, I’m sharing with you my roadmap for interesting events and dates in 2010:

  • January 7-10th: CES (Consumers Electronic Show) in Las Vegas
  • February 8th – 10th: Microsoft TechDays in Paris. I’ll be there  for the event and I’m hoping to be recruited by Microsoft for the ATE (Ask The Expert) stand where I’d like to share my WPF experience with other developers
  • March: release of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 RC
  • March 15-17th: MIX10 in Las Vegas. We can expect more announcements about Silverlight4 and hopefully some information about the future of Silverlight on mobile and demos of Windows Mobile 7 as well
  • April: release of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 final
  • Autumn : release of Windows Mobile 7

I think 2010 is going to be an exciting year with VS2010, .Net4, Silverlight4 and hopefully a mobile version of Silverlight too. Stay tuned 🙂

PDC09 : How VS2010 was built with WPF ?

.Net, Events, Tools, Visual Studio, WPF, , ,

PDC09

In my last blog post, I did a review of a PDC09 Session “Advanced performance tuning with WPF”. Today, I’m doing a review for another very interesting session “How VS2010 was built with WPF ?”. The video is available here.

vs2008tovs2010

Why did Microsoft choose WPF for VS2010 ?

  • Technological: prove the capabilities of WPF4
  • Architectural
    • Separated presentation
    • Support for long range road map (+10 years)
  • Key VS2010 features need it: Editor, Architecture Editor, Parallel tools debugging
  • Take an opportunity to give feedback for WPF4: when VS2010 development started, .Net 3.5 SP1 was just shipped and it was the right time to give feedback for the new features and fixes for WPF4.

It is worth noting that VS2010 is a project that is being watched carefully inside Microsoft. We can expect that more Microsoft applications will move to WPF in the next coming years.

What WPF features are used ?

  • Declarative UI using XAML
  • Databinding
  • Styles and templates
  • Application Resources
  • Interop Win32 (because they did not have the time to rewrite everything using WPF or because features doest not need to use WPF for example de WinForms designer…)
  • Integration with the message loop (to deal with particular focus issues)
  • New text stack (part of WPF4) based on DirectWrite

Staged approach

  • Define data models: a huge diagramming and architectural exercice
  • Replace the main window with WPF (only the window not its content !) to start the mix approach (managed/unmanaged, WPF/Hwnds)
  • Write new managed components: Window manager, command bar presentation
  • Scout with other VS teams
  • Test, Test, Test…

What were the challenges ?

  • Mixed mode application: native and managed code; WPF and HWNDs (Win32 or WinForms)
  • Keep existing extensions working and allow new extensions to take advantage of WPF
  • Don’t “stop the train” other teams were working at the same time on the product to add new functionalities
  • Text clarity
  • Performance
  • Focus management

You can watch the session here if you want more detail and demos of what I mention in this post.