Toluu

Tim Sneath

Musings of a Client Platform Guy

WPF Developers: PDC Wrap-Up and Visual Studio Tooling UpdateNovember 3 2008

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.

Silverlight 2 – Today is the Day!October 13 2008

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 2008

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 7 2008

Get it from http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?v=2.0 (tools are being propped as I write to http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/).

Lots of new goodies – keep hitting F5 on Scott Guthrie’s blog for 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!

Why You Want To Book Your PDC2008 Ticket NOW...May 30 2008

If you're into any of the technologies that this blog covers, you'll be mad if you miss the Professional Developers Conference this year. It's actually been three years since our last PDC, so we're overdue! I'm really excited about all the things we're going to be covering at the PDC this year: those of you who have attended the conference in the past will know that we only run a PDC when there is major news to share, and we've got some killer content this year. Registration opened yesterday, so now is a good time to get ahead of the crowd.

We keep most of the session titles under wraps until the event starts - this is a future-orientated conference, after all. But even from the session abstracts we've posted so far, you'll see sessions that cover the Live Mesh, Internet Explorer 8, Windows 7 (including details on how to program for the