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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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We released a minor maintenance update to Silverlight 1.0 over the weekend (internally known as GDR3 , where GDR stands for "General Distribution Release"). I'm sure most readers of this blog already have Silverlight 2 Beta 1 installed on their own machines, but if you're building a site for the tens of millions of users that already have Silverlight installed on their machine, you'll be pleased to know that we're continuing to service the 1.0 release to take account of customer-reported issues. The latest release is live now on the web for both Mac and PC ; it reports itself as 1.0.30401.0 (where the build number indicates that it was compiled on April 1st). The changes are minor in nature and shouldn't affect existing applications; they include an audio bug fix for nForce 4 motherboards , an update to support custom parameters in ASX playlists , fixes to font support on Mac OS X Leopard and improved multi-language support during installation and update. As ever, the way to check 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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It's been gratifying to see how much excitement there is out there about Silverlight. We've barely started the engines yet, but we've already had a number of big sites launch their first Silverlight experiences, and of course plenty of stuff underway that we'll be revealing over the coming months. Many .NET developers are naturally interested in the next release, which is when we'll introduce support for C# and Visual Basic development based on the .NET Framework. Although we haven't released any new major updates to the alpha developer preview of this functionality since MIX07, we're opening the kimono a little today to provide a bit more transparency in our schedule. Firstly, we're announcing today that we're renaming Silverlight 1.1 to Silverlight 2.0 . As we've been building out the feature set for Silverlight v.Next, it's been becoming increasingly clear that this is a big release. Adding together the Common Language Runtime, Base Class Libraries, Dynamic Language Runtime, the UI Frameworks, Read More...
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I see on the Channel 9 home page that we've hit the milestone of one hundred videos posted on WPF/Avalon. The latest video is one of my favorites so far - the ever-entertaining Kevin Moore (of KevinButton and Bag'o'Tricks fame) talking about and demonstrating all the new innovations in WPF 3.5 . (For a potted summary for those with a low attention span, this blog post contains some of the highlights.) It's interesting to go back to some of the earlier Channel 9 videos on Avalon to see some of the changes and (oops) schedule slips. Unfortunately, some of the older videos look like they've been archived, which is a great pity. We should get them up on MSN Soapbox or somewhere for posterity's sake, at least. It's fun to now be talking about the second release (shipping at the same time as Visual Studio 2008), and I'm looking forward to talking about the release after that before very long now (one of the things I'm spending a fair amount of time on right now). WPF has a rosy future ahead of Read More...
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As we close down on the release, we're actually pushing out an update to the Silverlight RC build in the next couple of hours. The update is Sunday night's drop - build 20730 (the last release was 20724), and I'm going to informally dub it "RC2" for ease of reference. This is one of a few critical updates that we'll be pushing down over the next couple of weeks to test the update mechanism. If you've set your update options to prompt on install, you'll see a dialog very like the following when you next visit a page that contains Silverlight functionality: All updates will require a restart at some time to take advantage of the functionality changes. All prompted updates can be “postponed” by not restarting the process until you are ready; when you next restart the browser or open a new window, you'll see the updated version (you can right click on any Silverlight content and choose "Silverlight Configuration" to see which build is actually running). There's no additional work required to Read More...
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In just a couple of weeks, we'll be ready to publish the Release Candidate of Silverlight 1.0 to the web. We're in the final stages of stabilization as we close in on launch; fixing the last few bugs, doing detailed security penetration testing work, resolving any remaining inconsistencies and completing the last fit and finish work. As Joe Stegman intimates in his recent blog posting , there are a few breaking changes between the beta and release candidate. Moving forward, the API is stable: there should be no further breaking changes between the release candidate and the final release. If you've already released a Silverlight application today based on the beta, we wanted to give you some advanced warning and ability to prepare for the RC so that your page isn't broken when the release candidate comes out. To that end, we've prepared a special preview SDK release that contains the following items: A new silverlight.js file that detects both the beta and the RC version; A breaking changes Read More...
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