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...
