Search results matching tag 'WPF'

On Expectations, PDC, Silverlight, and HTML 5

admin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:05:50 GMT

There has been a lot of commentary over the last few days about the PDC-Silverlight-HTML5 debacle, whether it is dead or not, etc. I posted to Twitter yesterday that I had an epiphany about why the strategy was what it was. But in talking to some of my colleagues in the Silverlight world, I was able to come to some different conclusions… plus over the past few days there has been a ton of great commentary.

Then today, Bob Muglia and Steve Ballmer each responded to calm down us crazy developers,. and kudos to them for quick responses, even if we did blow it way out of proportion. But I still think they missed some points. So I thought I’d still take a few moments and follow it up with some different points that haven’t exactly been addressed, that might be helpful to understand.

My observations and extrapolations about what’s going on inside DevDiv:

The “transparency vs. translucency” debate still rages on, internally (and externally). Some of us pundits like to call it the “Sinofsky Rule”. ‘Softies tell me that no official “rule” exists (I think it’s more like a guideline.) Unfortunately for us “complete-transparency-loving” bloggers, the lessons of PDCs past still affect communication decisions today. (As an aside, ‘Softies really don’t like it being called a ‘Sinofsky Rule’. I don’t know why. All great edicts have names, like the Monroe Doctrine, or the Gettysburg Address. It’s a far better name than “Shut The Hell Up, Already!” I just wish it were applied just a tiny bit differently… more on that later)
Silverlight v.Next and WPF v.Next are both in active development. Rob Relyea gave a 30-minute taped presentation on WPF Futures, where they discussed solving the major problem of WPF not playing nicely with HWNDs, and adding a SilverlightHost control to allow Silverlight content to be cleanly displayed and interacted with inside a WPF control. From what I understand, some of the features for Silverlight v.Next are already baked and ready to go.
Microsoft appears to be slowing the cadence of Silverlight releases. Microsoft shipped a Silverlight 4 preview before Silverlight 3 RTMed. This was clearly a bad idea, and Microsoft got a lot of feedback from customers to slow down. So I believe they are responding to that feedback, and allowing adoption time before the next release.
The Silverlight team has been working with the Windows Phone 7 team for a little while now. They finished Silverlight 4 well before .NET 4 was finished, as evidenced by the lack of deltas between releases. I believe this was so that they could fully focus on the work required for shipping (and evolving) the Phone runtime before it released.

Regarding PDC:

There are 3 yearly Microsoft conferences for Developers: PDC, TechEd, and MIX. This is how Microsoft sees these conferences, even if they haven’t explicitly stated that in the past:
- PDC – .NET & Windows Client Futures
- TechEd – .NET & Windows Client Today
- MIX – Web Today & Future
The model for the web is changing. The change from server + client to cloud + devices makes it more difficult to tailor these types of conferences to specific audiences. So the dissonance between this and previous PDCs can be chalked up to trying to figure out what that means.
PDC is all about getting “bits”. Customers don’t like Microsoft talking about things unless they can get bits into their hands by the time the conference is over. I personally miss getting DVDs and hard drives with buttloads of bits for my own crazy experimentation.
Given that structure, Silverlight would typically be discussed at MIX, not PDC. However, up until a couple weeks ago, there were Silverlight presentations on the docket for PDC10.
(Interesting Side Note) Having PDC on the Microsoft campus this year was not about saving Microsoft money, it was about saving customers’ money. From what I have heard, PDC10 cost the same as any other PDC, when you factor in the live streaming infrastructure, and the local events. Doing it this way was about not forcing companies to buy plane tickets and hotel rooms to get info on what is coming down the pipe.

What’s happening with HTML5:

HTML is the most ubiquitous technological “platform” ever deployed. I use the term platform loosely because HTML is just markup… but the point is, it’s *everywhere*. So you can’t avoid it, I can’t avoid it… and neither can Microsoft.
Standards-based innovation is cyclical. Organizations come together to standardize a particular platform, in this case HTML. It gains adoption, but invariably has shortcomings. So the market innovates to fill those gaps, which is why Silverlight and Flash exist in the first place. Then standards come in behind to evolve the “platform”, and the tools that used to fill the gaps have to follow suit. HTML5 marks the part of the cycle where the standard is trying to catch up. And that is OK.
IE9 is Microsoft’s first answer to the HTML5 standards process. And it’s a very good answer. HTML5 is going to be a part of the future, and the bits are available now, so THAT is why Microsoft chose to focus on it at PDC.
HTML5 (+ JavaScript + CSS3) still need tools. (I’m burnt by the lack of quality JavaScript tools on a daily basis.) This means that Microsoft is going to have to shift some resources to get those tools created. Yes, that means you can probably expect to see the focus return back to ASP.NET, IIS, etc. Visual Studio and Blend are the toolboxes for those tools, and I would personally expect to see more information at next year’s MIX conference in Vegas.

What all of this means for Silverlight:

Silverlight inside the browser is not going away just because HTML5 comes along. It will still work, and you can still target it.
Hardware replacement cycles are going to limit HTML5’s exposure in the enterprise. IE9 won’t run on XP, so Silverlight is still the best way to get great apps to those users.
At this part of the cycle, Microsoft is putting more energy into innovating Silverlight on Windows Phone than it is on the Desktop. And that’s fine with me, because the Phone runtime, while awesome, still needs a lot of work. For example, we need to get true parity with Silverlight 4, instead of the V3 & V4 hybrid we currently have.
NONE of this means that Silverlight is dead. Microsoft still understands the value of cross-platform Silverlight, and how combining that with Novell’s Mono offerings allow you to get .NET just about anywhere you want it. Jeremiah Morrill said it best on Twitter: “I'm glad my family isn't like software developers. They would of declared me dead because I didn't show up at the last thanksgiving.”
My belief: Don’t count on conversion tools from Microsoft. Microsoft is all about the “right tool for the job”. In Microsoft’s view, if you’re already using Silverlight, then why change it? If you’re not getting the benefits you need from Silverlight, you should be moving to WPF, not the other direction. That doesn’t mean that someone else couldn’t try… but why?

Kudos to Microsoft for getting out in front of it quickly, but I think it really could have been avoided though. I find it hard to believe that no one over there pointed out that people are going to be asking about Silverlight at PDC. Even when it was taken off the docket, it shouldn’t have been replaced with a vacuum.

As one of the guys that is typically pushing for particular technologies to be adopted within companies, here are some things Microsoft should keep in mind, to make my job easier in the future:

Previous communication strategies and release cycles set expectations. Putting out Silverlight v4 bits before the Silverlight v3 RTM set expectations that we would have seen Silverlight v5 bits by now. And the fact that you shared feature sets so early in the cycle with SL3 and SL4 set an expectation that we’d be getting some this time around as well. You guys need to be aware of that when you are planning.
Front-line developers are often the ones that help determine whether or not a company adopts a particular technology. But decision-makers hear bad PR and use it to put the kibosh on technology plans. By allowing Mary Jo to do what she does best, without being prepared for it and having a communication plan for Silverlight at PDC ahead of time, you might have set new Silverlight adoption back quite a bit.
Talking to customers individually is not the same as a blog post. It’s great that you reach out to customers big and small, but you need to arm the customers driving future adoption with the information they need to fight their battles internally.
You guys MUST start making the distinction between talking about specific features, and talking about general strategies. You can change direction and change focus, and give people details on what that means and how that affects their planning, without promising specific features or delivery dates. It’s OK to say something like “We’re going to be shifting the focus of our next release to the Phone, but we we’re not far enough into release planning to know what our target date is yet.” I think you guys went too far back towards secrecy after PDC 2003, and inching back towards being a little more transparent wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Too secret = too late to change things. The old Microsoft way of doing things made developers feel like by the tie you talked about something, it was too “baked” to change it”. We’re always afraid that you guys are going to drop a technology, and not tell us until you’re 5 months onto the new thing, with no hope of getting it back.
When in doubt, ask. That’s what you guys have MVPs for. When I was an MVP, I honored my NDAs, no matter what anyone thinks.

I hope that helps some people understand more what is going on. Hopefully this will help some of my clients settle down, and get back on track with their next XAML related releases .

Yahoo Dumps WPF Chat Client

admin — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 06:15:05 GMT

Well, Yahoo today decided to dump the one cool project they had going for them. At Vista’s launch, they showed off a WPF version of their Chat program that blew everyone away. They didn’t even actually build it, the people from Frog Design did. And they spent the last two years with their thumbs up their butts about it, taking forever to release an alpha, then a beta.

Claiming that it won’t run on XP (which is BS, because WPF is in .NET 3.0, which runs just fine on XP, Yahoo has thrown the code out the window, and will not be releasing a final version.

It’s just too bad too. I was actually looking forward to using the released version. Which would bring the number of Yahoo! products I use to… 1.

[via News.com]

TechEd Spoilers: 'Katmai' Gets Named, Storming the 'Acropolis'

admin — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 08:06:28 GMT

A Microsoft employee accidentally let the cat out of the bag a bit early. In a post that has since been taken down, "esendal" has announced that SQL Server "Katmai" has been re-christened SQL Server 2008. The announcement was more than likely supposed to come at the TechEd 2007 keynote later this morning. It will be available for download at http://connect.microsoft.com/sqlserver, potentially as early as today.

[via ActiveWin]

Also more than likely due to be announced is Microsoft Code Name 'Acropolis', which is yet another Microsoft runtime (YAMR)™. This one leverages WPF to help build loosely-coupled applications. From the help file:

"Acropolis" uses a composite application framework to address complex, changing business requirements. Composite applications integrate functionality as components that you can easily reconfigure or replace.
For example, a composite application might display data from a remote database, but let you choose between a WPF and a Windows Forms user interface. It might also enable users to choose from multiple components to interact with the data.
Composite applications often have a portal or "dashboard" look, but this is only one scenario of many. The important point about composite applications is that units of functionality remain loosely coupled to make change easier. Whether the change is a new business requirement or a user reconfiguration, making change easier makes improvement easier.

Sounds like a pretty nice framework. When you leverage this functionality with Windows Workflow Foundation, you're got yourself a pretty adaptable application. Now if only I had the time to learn it...

[via ActiveWin]

I'm assuming that more information will be available on both of these later today. I'll post links when they're available.

Microsoft Changes the Development Game

admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 22:38:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft completely changed the web development game, and chances are, you didn't even know it. If you STILL don't think Microsoft "gets it" after today's announcements, you're probably so ensconced in your tech-religious beliefs that there isn't much hope for you anyways.

“Look, I’ve got IronPython using ActiveRecord and LINQ, all inside the Safari browser on my Mac, and I’m debugging it in Visual Studio remotely from my PC.” These kinds of scenarios are in fact becoming possible, and those of us who appreciate all of these components individually will rightly pronounce it cool that they can come together in these ways.

Jon Udell quoted Jon Lam as saying that in a podcast he had right before MIX 07.

Microsoft now has an officially-supported cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework. That's cross-platform folks, not just cross-browser. That means, in the not too distant future those cool .NET apps you've been working so hard on (you HAVE been building apps on .NET, right?) will run on a Mac too.

But that's not all. Microsoft brought together some of the best minds in dynamic languages together, and built a common platform for implementing dynamic languages like Python and Ruby on top of .NET. It's called the Dynamic Language Runtime, and it plugs into the CLR, allowing anyone to plug in their own dynamic languages, much like you can with the CLR today.

It seems that I was right earlier, when I connected the dots on cross-platform support at the DLR. Oh yeah, and did I mention that the DLR will be open sourced under the BSD license? WHAT?!?!? Microsoft can open-source things too? Holy crap, where is my heart medication?

I don't think I can adequately convey how truly exciting this all is. Ruby is well on it's way to being an officially-supported .NET language, and their goal is to get Ruby on Rails working as well. So now all the really cool stuff going on there won't be confined solely to the LAMP platform. And the subset of .NET running inside Silverlight 1.1 is only a stepping stone to the day when Microsoft has the complete framework running on a Macs as well as PCs.

On a side note, Microsoft also demonstrated how to counter the "anti-1.0 software adoption" syndrome by releasing a beta of Silverlight 1.0 and an alpha of Silverlight 1.1 simultaneously. Genius.

I had a conversation with Robert Scoble about all this right before MIX, after he posted about Adobe's open-sourcing of Flex. He didn't think Microsoft would run .NET on a Mac because it doesn't sell OS licenses. But then I reminded him that the Developer Division is not about selling OS licenses, it's about building platforms that people use to build stuff on, and leveraging an ecosystem of first- and third-party tools to generate revenue for itself and its partners. Just because you choose not to use Microsoft's OS doesn't mean you have to lock yourself out of platforms (virtualization being the exception).

I can't wait to see the innovation that comes from these new components for Microsoft's vision of the web. I don't think these announcements will stop the zealotry entirely, but maybe interoperability will help jump-start the process. And

I leave you with a quote from Ray Ozzie, newly free from his self imposed Cone of Silence, from today's Q&A with Mike Arrington:

On the question of competing with Google, Ozzie responded: "The DNA of Microsoft is not going into a space unless we can change the game and win in some form. More interesting from a competitive standpoint related to Google and large incumbent competitors in general is how Microsoft approaches it and secondary and tertiary effects."

He alluded to moments in Microsoft's history when the company was spurred into action by competitive forces, citing open source and Java as leading to cultural changes and reshaping Microsoft, a side or secondary effect of the competitive battles. "If you go back to Sony years ago, the Playstation 2 look unassailable. A side effect, secondary effect was the creation of an entire entertainment and devices division in Microsoft," Ozzie said.

Ozzie went on to say, "From a Google perspective, the secondary impacts have already begun to happen," resulting in the ad model Microsoft had never considered before. "With services, we decided to make an investment and scale the back end for search and ads, now we are thinking about how to 'platformize' it, so we developers can better take advantage of it."

Vista's Antitrust Complaints Just Hit a Snag

admin — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:16:52 GMT

Adobe's gonna have a lot harder time proving that XPS infringes on its territory, after the Justice Department announced today that Windows Vista and IE7 passed a thorough anti-trust review.

According to the report, Microsoft and the technical committee have been offering a downloadable program that is designed to help Microsoft's competitors in the fields of Web browsers, e-mail and instant-messaging clients, and media players to make their programs "Vista-ready" before the new operating system ships.

...

Since the last status report filing in May, government attorneys said they received 25 complaints alleging antitrust concerns about competing middleware but said they concluded that none of those gripes had merit.

I'd like to think that puts the Adobe matter to rest, but I doubt it. My take: if they didn't want Microsoft to make a PDF exporter for Office, they shouldn't have made it a royalty-free standard.

But something tells me that Adobe will press on anyways.

As a side note, the original name of "The Technical Committee" was "The Visually Appealing Committee", but the name was rejected after the lawyers failed to adequately define "appealing".

Fun with Acronyms

admin — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 12:17:00 GMT

According to eWeek, Longhorn isn't the only one to have a name change. Even thought Microsoft stepped away from the alphabet soup for Windows Vista, we're back to dealing with three-letter acronyms (TLAs) for Indigo and Avalon. (Side note: isn't it funny that the acronym for Three Letter Acronym is itself a three letter acronym?)

Indigo = Windows Communication Foundation
Avalon = Windows Presentation Foundation

Personally, I think Avalon's name is dumb. When I try to explain Avalon to a non-techie end user, and I use the word "presentation", they say "Oh, you mean like Powerpoint?" Microsoft's mantra for names from this point forward should be "eschew obfuscation".

WinFX Runtime Beta 1

admin — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 11:11:00 GMT

The WinFX Runtime Beta 1 contains the Indigo communications system, as well as the Avalon UI system. This version is fully compatible with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2. This version is also the version that will be found installed by default in Windows Vista Beta 1.

Download WinFX Beta 1
Download WinFX Beta 1 SDK (when available, compatible with VS2005 Beta 2)

Avalon CTP Available To Public!

rmclaws2k — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 19:00:00 GMT

Tim Sneath tells us that Microsoft has made the Avalon November Community Technology Preview available to everyone, not just MSDN subscribers. This version runs on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, and is also relatively stable. So, now's your chance to start playing with the way to build apps for the next decade.

Raise Routed Event through RaiseEvent

zhanbos — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 05:53:00 GMT

(Version: Avalon CTP 2004 November)

Both UIElement and ContentElement implement IInputElement interface, which defines RaiseEvent method. This post gives you an example of using it.

We start with a simple Xaml file:

<Window x:Class="AvalonApplication1.Window1"

xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/xaml" xmlns:x="Definition"

Text="AvalonApplication1">

</DockPanel>

</Window>

Two event handlers are defined as follows:

private void ButtonClick1(object sender, RoutedEventArgs args)

{

//Do Nothing

}

private void ButtonClick2(object sender, RoutedEventArgs args)

{

MessageBox.Show("Button2 Just Received Click Event");

}

So when you click on btn2, you see a MessageBox. But when you click on btn1, you do not see anything in particular.

Now we are going to add code into ButtonClick1 so that it will raise Click event on btn2. As a result, the same MessageBox shows up when you click on btn1. The code below makes use of RaiseEvent:

private void ButtonClick1(object sender, RoutedEventArgs args)

{

RoutedEventArgs evtArgs = new RoutedEventArgs();

evtArgs.SetRoutedEventID(Button.ClickEventID);

btn2.RaiseEvent(evtArgs);

}

Note we do not call ButtonClick2 directly. Instead, we raise the Click event on btn2. ButtonClick2 is called to handle that event.

I end this post with a question for my reader: What will happen if we change ButtonClick1 code again? Are you going to see a MessageBox, a ContextMenu , an Exception, or nothing at all?

private void ButtonClick1(object sender, RoutedEventArgs args)

{

RoutedEventArgs evtArgs = new RoutedEventArgs();

evtArgs.SetRoutedEventID(ContextMenu.OpenedEventID);

btn2.RaiseEvent(evtArgs);

}

(This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Use of included script samples are subject to the terms specified at http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm)

New Avalon available at the worst time (..for me)

akinney — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 05:49:00 GMT

What great timing! For the next two weeks, I am going to be home with my test box for one day, and out comes a brand new release of Avalon. Seriously I'm very excited to get it running and am happy for those involved in the release. Now we'll all believe that "yes, Avalon will run on XP".

These two weeks will be an exercise in patience and where I'll have to enjoy just reading about it. Actually, this article prepared for the release gives a very intriging overview of the new features made available.

One of the particular items that I found interesting was the concept of StoryBoards. When you start using multiple animations and multiple timelines you need a way to manage them. Flash does this by abstracting different Timelines into different Movie Clips, and now Avalon has an equivalent with StoryBoards.

Its exciting to read about all of the enhancements geared towards Animation throughout WinFX. Once I get the new Avalon running I plan to really dive into this area.