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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 multi-touch feature we showed off this week at Walt Mossberg's D conference ), as well as really hardcore deep-dive sessions on topics like the internals Read More...
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Today I'm excited to announce the public beta availability of a major new release of WPF. Since we shipped .NET Framework 3.5 late last year, the team has been hard at work at a new release that adds many supplemental features, fixes a good number of bugs, offers many performance optimizations, and includes a new streamlined installer for a subset profile of the .NET Framework optimized for client scenarios. This new release will ship as part of .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 later this summer; the beta release is an early preview of these enhancements. In this blog post, I want to provide a broad overview of the new features in this release, focusing on WPF. Download links: Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Beta) .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (Beta) Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions SP1 (Beta) Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 (Beta) Deployment It's been interesting over the last year or two to see the balance between business and consumer applications developed Read More...
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As many people will have noticed, we released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 this week ( read about the notable changes here ). Aside from the inevitable bug fixes and enhancements to support new hardware types, one of the underlying changes is that SP1 brings the Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 codebases together. This is a big deal, but it's surprising how few people have noted it: this is the first time we've ever had a common codebase for Windows that goes all the way from a budget consumer PC right up to a mainframe-class datacenter server. Internally to Microsoft, this makes it easier for us to provide sustained engineering on the product: if we want or need to update a system component, we only have to produce two binaries (x86 and x64) for all languages and product editions. Compare that to the days of Windows XP/2003, when we had maybe 25 different language editions and x86 and x64 variants for both client and server OS releases, and you can see how the testing matrix has become Read More...
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Deploying Silverlight content to a production web server is a pretty easy process. Despite occasional misconception, Silverlight doesn't require a Microsoft-based web server: Apache can host up Silverlight content just as happily as IIS. But there's one little gotcha: web servers are typically configured to only serve up a limited set of known file extensions as static content. That's all well and good, but Silverlight introduces two new file extensions (.xaml for loose XAML files and .xap for the zip-based binary packaging format). As a result, you need to add the MIME types for those file extensions to your web server so that it recognizes Silverlight content appropriately. Here are the MIME types you need to add to the server configuration: Extension MIME Type .xaml application/xaml+xml .xap application/x-silverlight-app That's all you have to do. Unfortunately, it's not possible to provide generic instructions for how to add MIME types, as it varies from server to server, but here are Read More...
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It can be pretty hard to keep everything up-to-date on a developer workstation these days. With so many CTP releases, betas, and service packs, I know I often realize that my own machine is behind in one area or another. One particularly worthwhile update that might have missed your attention over the last couple of weeks is a new release of the Windows SDK , focused on enhancements in the .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008. Amongst other changes, this updated SDK has new documentation that covers all the new classes in WPF 3.5 (e.g. UIElement3D, System.AddIn, LINQ-based data binding), a variety of new samples for common Windows services such as User Account Control, Windows Search, Windows Error Reporting, Speech, and a range of shell APIs. If you've not installed the Windows SDK before, another incentive is a ZIP file containing over 100MB of sample WPF code (check out %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Samples\WPFSamples.zip). After installing Read More...
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In celebration of the launch of Windows Vista (and of course, Windows Presentation Foundation), I sat down with Ian Ellison-Taylor yesterday to chat about what's next for WPF. We touch briefly on the inception of the project and the surprises and the challenges encountered along the way, before drilling deeper into the roadmap for the future. In summary, you can expect to see lots of add-ons being published that fill out some of the gaps in WPF today, with a maintenance release coming out alongside Visual Studio "Orcas". Watch the video on Channel 9. Ian's actually an interesting guy - he's been around at Microsoft for about 17 years now, starting as an intern on the Windows 3.1 shell team. He's got some fun stories to tell about what it was like to be working on Windows in the early 1990s, and I filmed a follow-up chat with him to find out more. That video is in the Channel 9 queue; I'll update this post with a link when it goes live in the next day or so. Oh, and apologies for any distraction Read More...
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