Visual Studio 2008 Annoyances - Working with XML DataSources

by Don Burnett

Okay I sat down and started playing with Visual Studio Express 2008 sku's today. In general I am very impressed by the additions to the functionality.. But there is ONE simple thing that has annoyed me from even the last version of Visual Studio, that's of it's XML support and the consistency across products etc.. Now granted I am a designer/developer type. Which means I am more about design than I am development, but as a designer I have to occasionally dig into Visual Studio..

I have blogged about this before, but I don't think anyone read it..

Let's take a look here at a nice feature in Microsoft's own Expression Blend Product..

When you add an XML datasource, it will nicely handle just about any web service including a SIMPLE RSS data feed...

Meanwhile over in Visual Studio land with their designer, I still have to go in through code and parse the XML DATA... Or if I tried to add this as a web service or make a service reference, I get this..

Or using the XML datasource control with a URL (you can't without going to code).. (the URL typed into the data field below does not work)

It seems you still can't read in simply an RSS feed without code.. Now I admit I use blend more than I do Visual Studio, but honestly the Visual Studio team should be considering these kinds or things for consistency across the board. I know if I were a beginning developer and didn't know how to do this in code, I'd be in Blend almost immediately.. Simply put I think this is another misgiving that I have about Visual Studio and the Visual Studio development team at Microsoft. They seem to be ignoring how easy it is to do this kind of thing in even their other tools..

I think it would do the Visual Studio team some good to start talking with the Expression Blend team and making some of the tools they have in later Visual Studio versions a bit easier instead of ignoring the obvious. Things that would help people new to the Visual Studio IDE keeps getting ignored, even though they have added MANY new features and simplified development greatly..

I ask you your opinion, if you were working with XML data alone like an RSS Feed wouldn't you rather be doing this in BLEND? Come on, Visual Studio team you are ignoring some very obvious things that you could be improving how Visual Studio works, if you'd just be looking at how other products work even in your own organization..

I am preaching unification here because Visual Studio still doesn't seem to be seeing the improvements that I am personally hoping for. Come on guys, simple additions like adding URL support to Visual Studio 2008's XML data source would have been a really smart move.. Meanwhile I am glad we have Blend! It's not always about bloatware, it's rethinking what you have already got to make it better..

For those curious about using RSS with Visual Studio, there is an RSS screen saver code example (apparantly Windows APIs can read RSS they just didn't consider improving this functionality in Visual Studio itself.. But nevertheless, if you want to learn the Windows RSS API I suggest you look at this RSS screen saver example from the Coding4Fun dashboard application which you can download alongside the new Visual Studio Express editions or the C4F website itself.. Oh and that sound recorder Application that is below in the picture below the RSS example, doesn't work with the X64 edition, the program keeps coming back saying not a valid Win32 Application when you select "run app".. Yet another annoyance of mine, another team not writing for full 64-bit windows transparency.. There must have been an obvious hurry to get this stuff out..

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Technorati tags: Visual Studio 2008, Expression Blend, Working with XML Data, Unification

Dot Net 3.5 beta 2 Improvements for WPF

By Don Burnett

At today's meeting of http://MichiganInteractiveDesigners.org we explored Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2's WPF support. This version has a new final name and is no longer called "Orcas"..

It was exciting to install and start an exhaustive review process.. We found a bunch of new goodies. First thing we found is that the WPF designer is vastly improved. It's so nice it will probably keep most of the developers out of Blend for a while (unless they are die-hard animation geeks), or not require them to enter Expression Blend at all.

The biggest win for the new WPF designer is the new language service based Intellisense which works much much better than in Beta 1.

Databinding is improved in this release as well as they have included XLINQ binding. If you haven't already read about LINQ it's a great way to incorporate data from a SQL server or other types of data sources (anything that LINQ supports really and I hear that's very extensible). A lot of developers were clamoring for data binding to SQL server in WPF and this is a very good solution to that need. They have also taken care to add support for data validation, so you can trap data errors and catch thrown exceptions.

TextBox and RichTextBox (aka RTB's) controls are seeing functional upgrades, from the new Undo "history support" to RTB's now supporting things like buttons and other inline elements from things like flow documents.

A few things not related to Visual Studio has been improved about WPF as well, there is now hardware accelerated graphics on layered windows within WPF (in Vista of course). Something that should increase performance for UI generation by quite a bit.

Another XAML improvement is UIElement3D. I have been using the 3dTools.dll for a while now to map 2D interactive content and controls to a 3D surface, now it's built right in and looks like it works great (not a big change from 3Dtools).

Browser based WPF applications (known as XBAP's) are seeing some improved capability. One of the drawbacks to doing a browser based application is it ran in a sandbox, for security and passing data in and out via web services and interacting with cookies were very difficult. That has all changed now, as you can now use Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in partial trust mode in a browser application and security has been changed so you can now read and write to cookies over HTTP and works in partial trust mode (a feature developers have been begging for). Also better support for pen based input (in the wake of Microsoft Surface) has now been implemented for browser applications. Oh, and if this wasn't enough of an improvement you can now also run an XBAP in Firefox directly (no more reverting to IE 7).

The "App model" has been extended, this is something I was looking for in a later Acropolis CTP but didn't have to wait for long and has been extended to all types of WPF applications. There is support for things like versioning of applications, lifecycle management, discovery and dare I even mention this "ACTIVATION" which is probably one of the most controversial features, but good for developers who need to manage application distribution and usage.

Other things improved: Animation, they fixed frame rates and animation smoothness. Thanks for listening on this one Microsoft, this probably wasn't easy to do.

So that scratches the surface, these are great improvements and it's only beta 2. We haven't had time to look at the new Expression Web "type" support that is now built-in to Visual Studio 2008, but from the looks of it, there are many improvements there as well

Look for more news this week as the Adventure Continues...

Technorati tags: .NET 3.5, Dot NET, wpf, wcf, Visual Studio 2008, beta 2, WPF enhancements

Winforms Control Set for Silverlight and FLASH

by Don Burnett

Over at Tim Sneath's Blog, Tim blogs about company called Netikatech.com who has created a bunch of cool new custom controls for both Silverlight and Flash. These controls are very cool because they have implemented the Winforms control library. This is a big step ahead for Silverlight, because you can now do in Silverlight most of the controls you see in regular Windows application in either Flash or Silverlight.

This means you can port a whole Windows Application UI over to the web and it makes porting real .NET applications to the web and a universally viewable platform possible.

Here's some examples (clicking on the graphics will bring up the Silverlight demo):

A typical tab control with buttons and radio buttons

Office-style toolbars

A datagrid

Outlook style calendaring UI

A visual studio style designer for the web

Check em out they are worth your time if you are doing Silverlight or Flash..

The GOA System.Windows.Forms core library includes 40+ standard controls and components:

• Control, ContainerControl, ScrollableControl, Panel
• Button, CheckBox, RadioButton, GroupBox, Label
• TextBox, NumericUpDown
• ImageBox, ImageList
• ScrollBar, HScrollBar, VScrollBar
• Form, MessageBox, Cursor
• ListBox, CheckedListBox
• ComboBox
• TreeView
• MonthCalendar
• TabControl, Splitter
• ToolTip, ProgressBar, Timer
• ToolStrip, StatusStrip, MenuStrip, ToolStripButton, ToolStripComboBox, ToolStripDropDown, ToolStripLabel, ToolStripProgressBar, ToolStripSeparator, ToolStripSplitButton, ToolStripTextBox
• XamlCanvas (Silverlight specific)

GOA WinForms Professional is the perfect solution for GOA developers who want to integrate high-end controls in their existing RIA applications. In addition to the System.Windows.Forms core library, GOA WinForms Professional includes a set of advanced controls for quickly creating rich user interfaces:

• The standard WinForms controls of the free edition
• A sophisticated Data Grid
• More than 30 extended controls and components

Technorati tags: Silverlight Controls, Missing Functionality, Winfoms functionality for Silverlight