Toluu

Tim Sneath

Musings of a Client Platform Guy

WPF Developers: PDC Wrap-Up and Visual Studio Tooling UpdateNovember 3

Over the next week or so, I want to put a bit of context behind some of the announcements from PDC, particularly the ones that got glossed over amidst the excitement over Windows 7 and Windows Azure. I’m going to start with highlighting some of the work we’ve done around WPF over the last couple of months.

Silverlight and WPF: Avoiding the Tyranny of “Or”…

We talked a lot at the PDC about how we’re continuing to make a very heavy bet on WPF as a platform. Hopefully folk spotted the significance of Scott Guthrie (usually known as the “web guy” and one of the fathers of ASP.NET) spending such a large percentage of his time talking about WPF. We’ve got a big team working hard at new investments in our flagship platform for building Windows applications, and the broad take-up we’re seeing from customers like Autodesk, Roxio, HP, Lenovo, AMD and others is representative of the ongoing momentum behind WPF.

PDC Proceedings: The Book of the ConferenceOctober 26

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m sitting back-stage in the huge keynote room here at the PDC in Los Angeles. Watching some great demo rehearsals; things are shaping up well for the “software experiences” keynote which is my area of responsibility, and it’s going to be an exciting week.

I wanted to take a moment to tell folk about one of the innovations we’re introducing this year at the PDC. One of the big challenges with a large conference like PDC is figuring out how on earth you can attend all the breakout sessions you want. Wherever you are, you have a nagging doubt that you’re missing some really crucial, interesting information that’s being imparted somewhere else. Sure, we’re recording sessions for later viewing, but frankly, who has time to sit and watch 400 hours of content? It’s a great way to catch one or two extra sessions, but no more. And many of us are so attention-challenged that the idea of sitting passively for even ten minutes is a challenge!

Early this spring, I was thinking about whether we could tackle this problem in a different way. I’m a huge fan of getAbstract – an offering that provides 1-2 page abstracts of thousands of business books. Heck, almost all books in this category have just a few ideas padded into 300+ pages so that they can be sold in book form – you can get 80% of the value this way!

So - what would it look like if for every session we produced

Silverlight 2 – Today is the Day!October 13

A gloomy, rainy Monday morning is rarely a pleasure to be savored, but today is a great day! We’ve signed-off on the final release of Silverlight 2 – every control has been added, the last few bug fixes have made it into the release, and it’s finally ready to relinquish the “beta” mantle.

Download links to the end-user runtime will be propped by the end of the day, at which point it will officially be considered live, and I’ll update this post throughout the day with additional information and links.

From a development perspective, there are a number of breaking changes from Silverlight 2 Beta 2, as noted here. (Note, however, that there are no breaking changes from Silverlight 1.0 – we have a philosophy of maintaining 100% compatibility between published releases.)

We’ve been working with a number of the biggest beta early adopter sites to get prepared for the final release – sites like Hard Rock, NBC Olympics, the DNCC and many others are either already working on the final “RTW” build, or are migrating across this evening. If you have a site that is using Silverlight 2 Beta 2, you’ll want to read through the

What You’ll Hear at PDC2008September 23

My favorite conference is almost upon us. If I’ve been quiet for a little while on my blog, it’s because this has been a crazy busy season for me and my team, as we put all the pieces in place for PDC2008.

PDC is Microsoft’s flagship conference, both because of the scale and depth of content, but also because it’s unique as a time when we open up as a company and share almost everything that’s been under wraps for the previous year or so.

This year is more significant than most – it’s been three years since the last PDC. That’s a lifetime in the software world – at PDC05, we hadn’t yet shipped Windows Vista, WPF, WCF, PowerShell, Visual Studio 2005 or SQL Server 2005. It’s high time we provided a set of deep, Level 400 developer sessions on new innovations like LINQ, C# 3.0, .NET 3.5SP1, Silverlight and so on.

But PDC isn’t primarily about shipping technologies. PDC is always a coming out party for the platform of the future. In the past, we’ve announced everything from .NET to “Longhorn” at the PDC (admittedly along with some blue sky projects that never truly saw the light of day, like “Cairo”). This year, we’ll be announcing a raft of new technologies that will impact every developer who focuses on Microsoft platf

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Is Here!June 6

Get it from http://silverlight.net/GetStarted, along with the developer tools, documentation and the June update to Blend 2.5.

Lots of new goodies – as ever, Scott Guthrie’s blog has a comprehensive guide. I’m not going to try and compete with him today: my family tell me it’s time for the weekend to start!

If you’re looking for something to try out, there’s an updated version of Hard Rock’s Memorabilia site, but the really cool new site out there is a graphical adventure called Buddy Knavery, written in the style of old-school games like Zak McKracken and Maniac Mansion. I’ve already wasted far too much time playing with it instead of updating this blog post! There’s some amazing work here – hard to believe that it was all written by one guy in his spare time…