Search results matching tags 'xaml', 'avalon', and 'WinFx'

Requests for xaml:blog should be forwarded to spaces.msn.com/rrelyea

rrelyea — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 16:43:00 GMT

I've moved longhornblogs.com/rrelyea over to msn spaces.

If you want to see any of my future posts, please go to:
http://spaces.msn.com/rrelyea

RSS: http://spaces.msn.com/rrelyea/feed.rss

Thanks to everybody here at LHBlogs for hosting me since PDC 2003.

Databinding + Datavisualization Demo with WPF/XAML/VB

rrelyea — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 13:40:00 GMT

Many people say that Databinding is one of the more impactful of the features in WPF.
Namita wrote a great set of demos for her PDC talk about Databinding with WPF.

As part of a few talks (some VB customers, a Vista + WPF talk, a talk at the Borland Developer Conference), I used that demo.

I've finally gotten around to posting my version of it.

Here is a screen shot of the auction window:

If you click on the Map button in bottom left of that, a nice data visualization example is shown using a custom tree map control that I believe Kevin Moore wrote:

The app has a good separation between the data and the UI...

The items on the left of the auction window are just renderings for each AuctionItem in a listbox.

From Window1.xaml:

The rendering for each auction item is controlled by a data template that was specified in myapp.xaml declaratively.

</Image>
</Border>

<Canvas HorizontalAlignment="Right"
        VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Height="100" Width="100">

</Canvas>

     </Grid>
   </Viewbox>
  </DataTemplate>

Dig into the demo and go watch Namita's pdc talk!

Please let us know what you think.

Why isn't xmlns:def="Definition" gone yet...cost of change...

rrelyea — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 12:48:00 GMT

Drew Marsh asked a good question recently about why we didn't Uri-ize the Definition xmlns yet... I answered via a comment here.

Keep raising issues that you don't see getting fixed...

Thanks, Rob

PS. Making any breaking change is way too expensive. We are working on a tool right now that can make any object model name change for you...in xaml. We're also getting it to work with C#. If things work well, perhaps we'll have a tool in the future to help our developers make changes and all the customers building on top of us may get some of their code changed automatically...Won't be perfect, but may get people a long way.

I look at it as a delayed refactoring tool. Love the VS Whidbey refactoring stuff for your local project...but when you have hundreds or thousands or more people building on top of you, the refactoring features don't do anything to delay the refactoring.

CTP - XAML Viewer working inside VisualStudio!

rrelyea — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 11:36:00 GMT

Gaston Milano is a self-proclaimed “VS man” - so he wanted a XAML Viewer that worked inside of Visual Studio Whidbey. So he wrote one!

Screen shots look great!

(I just left a comment with my problems getting it running on Visual C# Express. I'll have to wait until I get into work to see it on the full Visual Studio.)
Update: According to Gaston, VS Express SKUs don't allow the same “VSIP“ extensibility hooks. I'll try it with the full Visual Studio later today.

Anybody try this yet?

Thanks Gaston!

3rd public release of Avalon...a few details on the development experience

rrelyea — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 22:48:00 GMT

First, PDC 2003. Second, WinHec 2004. Now an Avalon Customer Tech Preview!

Three interesting links way below that I stole from http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/.

First, a link to the bits for MSDN members.
Second, a link to online documentation and samples.
Third, a good overview of what is new or changed in this release.

I'm happy that this release will able to run on Windows XP (and Windows Server 2003 too). I have this build running on my laptop with xp sp2, and it has very little impact on my daily use unless I'm building an application and running it.

Installing VS beta1, Avalon, and then WinFX SDK will give you a decent VS development experience for Avalon applications.

We have 4 project templates for Visual Basic or C# developers.
Avalon Application
Avalon Browser Application - will run in Internet Explorer by just changing a property in the .csproj or .vbproj file
Avalon Navigation Application
Avalon Control Library

In the xml editor, while editing a XAML page, you should get decent intellisense since the WinFX SDK installs a schema for Avalon class use in XAML. Look in %programfiles%\microsoft visual studio 8\xml\schemas\ for avalon*.xsd and xaml*.xsd

No visual designer yet... :-(

F1 Help works from C# or VisualBasic code. In the XML Editor though, it is broken in this build.

No major XAML syntax changes in this build, but many changes to the elements and other features you can use.

Give it a try...would love to see what you can do with it...

Shipping feels good!

-Rob

"Avalon" Community Technology Preview Available
The Community Technology Preview of "Avalon" can be found in the Microsoft® WinFX™ Software Development Kit (SDK), available for download by MSDN Subscribers. It contains documentation, samples, command-line compilers, and tools designed to help you develop managed-code applications and libraries using WinFX.

WinFX SDK Online
The WinFX SDK for the version of WinFX that includes the Avalon class libraries and runs under Windows XP is available for your perusal online.

What's New in the "Avalon" Community Technology Preview
In this article, we'll take a brief look at some of the changes that have been made to Avalon since the PDC release a year ago, and highlight some useful resources to help you further explore Avalon.

Attribute grammar for xaml attributes

rrelyea — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 02:09:00 GMT

We have a bit of a mess in our processing for attributes. First, a list of the mess, then a brief description of the fix we plan.

Attribute values in xaml can map to:

1) a Literal value
<Balloon Color=”Red” />
We use the type converter from the type of the Color property.
I'm happy with this.

2) Star syntax.
    “*null” - sets the property to equals null.
    “*ClassName.StaticMember” - sets the property to equal the static member
    “*ClassName(PropertyName1=PropertyValue1,PropertyName2=PropertyValue2,...)” - we call this compact syntax. it is most used for databinding - *Bind(Path=LastName), but has a few downsides - a) allows any class to be set this way (on top of the already possible property tag syntax). b) syntax doesn't solve all nesting, escaping problems.
    “*typeof(ClassName)” - set the property to equal the Type ClassName.
    “{ResourceName}” - if being set on a FrameworkElement or FrameworkContentElement, calls .SetResourceReference();
    I don't like the fact that the xaml parser builds in knowledge of Resources, an Avalon framework feature.

3) Event Handler Name
<Button Click=”onclickhandler” />
I'm happy with this.

--------

We plan on changing the star syntax to something called “Computed value”. (not thrilled with the name)
We'll build one extension mechanism into the parser and allow different users of xaml to build their own extensions.

One thing this will allow is to remove the knowledge that the xaml parser has of the Avalon framework feature - Resources.

The xaml parser lives in PresentationFramework.dll, but one of the key goals is to continue to untie it from the Avalon framework. In version 1, we'll likely still ship it in PresentationFramework.dll, but conceptually we are designing it as if it was in WindowsBase.dll - it should define well factored extensions that are based on different CLR concepts - existing concepts when possible - new ones when necessary. TypeConverters, IList, IDictionary, etc...

As part of this change, the flexibility that people have with compact syntax will be reduced. Today, they can use *Bind(), *Button(), *AnyClass() in any attribute. We'd like to restict this to a small set of classes that are explicitly in need of being set in an attribute.

I'm not going into great detail in the description of our fix because I'd prefer to be the first company to ship our design. :-)

So once we do this work, we'll have:

LiteralValues - go through type converters.
ComputedValues - go through 1 well defined extension mechanism to support scenarios that need to be handled in attributes that map to many different Types. Bind and ResourceReference, for example, can be used to set Height, of type Length, or to set Background, of type Brush. We don't want to change all type converters to know about Bind and ResourceReference.
EventHandlers

new Xaml terminology.

rrelyea — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 20:01:00 GMT

Among other things, I (and my teammates) have spent much of the last year designing significant improvements to xaml2003 that you saw at the PDC in October 2003. While we have spent a lot of time investing in design, we haven't implemented many of the changes yet. As such, I hadn't wanted to do much posting yet.

I got back from vacation last week and found out that we'll continue some implementation very soon. I'm very excited!

A few things to restart the flow of info about what we are doing...

Processes that involve Xaml & Baml

XamlLoading - process of loading xaml and creating objects.

XamlSaving - process of saving an object and all related objects to xaml.

XamlCompiling - process of creating code and a binary representation during compile time.

BamlLoading - process of loading code/binary representation during run time.

People used to throw around a bunch of terms for these things: Parsing, Serialization, etc…

Right now, we think that list is clear and well defined.

Syntax Terminology for setting properties via markup

Attribute Syntax - Setting a property with an xml attribute

PropertyTag Syntax - Setting a property with a PropertyTag contained inside the ObjectTag (Balloon). The PropertyTag denotes which property you are trying to set on the outermost ObjectTag. The content inside the PropertyTag provides the value.

<Balloon.Brush>

</Balloon.Brush>

</Balloon>

(Previous names - Complex syntax. Compound syntax.)

Content Syntax - Many objects will have a property that is the ContentProperty. For example:

<Button>Hello</Button>

will effectively create a Button and set Button.Content="Hello".

For a long time, we've relied on IAddChild and let component authors decide what their ContentProperty was. We're hoping to decorate types with that information and remove IAddChild from Avalon.

---

Crazy busy for the next several weeks, but I'll try to keep some things coming...

-Rob

Walking the thin line with XAML

rrelyea — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 10:41:00 GMT

Chris positions XAML vs general serialization technologies and approaches.

...
XAML was designed to be a compromise markup format, that balanced the toolability and readability aspects of a markup. You can think of HTML as a markup that was squarely designed to be readable, but not very toolable. SOAP on the other hand is very toolable, but almost impossible to read. In the design of XAML we constantly walk the line between the two. XAML has support for inline code, customer parser extensions, and multiple representations of the same structure.
...

This piece hightlights some of the conflicting goals that influence the decisions we make with XAML. It'll be a while before our current evolved design (what I'm calling xaml2004) makes it out to the world in a build, but I think people will be happy with the continued focus we have on moving XAML in a generic technology direction.

Readability and writability, I believe, is critical to the success of XAML. Many folks will be using a visual designer, so they won't appreciate it, but I think many people will like to read/write it directly (at least occassionally).

Perhaps we are focusing on that too much now since we are all still using an XML editor to create XAML pages. Once designers get built and have more use, we'll see if we'll change some of our decisions. For now, I think it is important to walk that thin line...

The .Net Show - filming about avalon

rrelyea — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 22:57:00 GMT

Pablo Fernicola (Group Program Manager), David Ornstein (Lead Program Manager), Nathan Dunlap (Rockin' Designer), and I spent time yesterday with Robert Hess and the .Net Show crew.

The .Net Show blog posted about the filming (with links to photos) etc...

Interesting format. Nathan showed the Login Screen demo a new demo showing using Paths for States and having those states in a ListBox. I showed some basic xaml concepts, talked about markup and programming model and showed a bit of my Viewer application.

Once it goes live, you'll have to post feedback...I'm new to the whole video thing.

Thanks to Robert and crew for asking me to appear!

Today you can't compile xaml on the fly.

rrelyea — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 14:07:00 GMT

A posting in the channel 9 wiki on getting stated with xaml led me to clarify how xaml pages load in IE and why you sometimes need to compile them.

XAML Loading in IE

Currently, if you have a xaml page and it doesn't have any code embedded (or in a code behind file) you can just double click it and it will load in IE.

What happens when you do that.

1) Windows Explorer realizes that .xaml files should be loaded in IE.
2) IE loads and realizes for that mime type PresentationHost.exe should be loaded into IE as the DocObject that knows how to render xaml content.
3) PresentationHost.exe passes the .xaml file to the xaml parser, it creates the tree of objects and it renders.

This is the same technology that allows word documents to be loaded inside of IE.

Sometimes Compilation is Necessary

If you want to start adding code to a xaml file, we currently require a compile step. There are a few ways to do this:
1) run XamlC.exe (installed with the LHSDK)
>xamlc foo.xaml

2) create a Longhorn project in VS, it will create the msbuild project file for you (.csproj, .vbproj) and a few .xaml files. You can then compile this in VS or via the command line.
Command Line: 1) cd to the directory of the project. 2) >msbuild

3) you could create a msbuild project file by hand and then use command line as stated in #2

Should We Autocompile When Running in IE

On developer machines, perhaps we should. I'm hesitant to do it on end user machines.

HTML + script + browser security hole is sometimes a dangerous weapon. We need to be careful about making .xaml files themselves have autocompile behavior for this reason.

That said, I'm not happy with the barrier to entry that we currently have...we're continuing to think about it...

Update: Jason Nadal has a post/comments that have some additional info: http://weblogs.asp.net/jnadal/archive/2003/11/17/38124.aspx