Rob Relyea - XAMLified

At PDC 08, Daniel Roth and I had a great time sharing info about the next wave of XAML goodness coming to .NET 4.

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL36/ has the full video (also the powerpoint is downloadable)…about 60 minutes of presentation and demo and then 15 minutes of questions and answers on the recording. 

1) XAML 2009 – new features coming to the XAML language

2) XAML Data Model – O-M-V + Types

3) New system component – System.Xaml.dll (System.Xaml CTP coming in November 2008)

4) XAML Ready Frameworks in .NET 4

• Continued great support in WPF
• Much improved XAML support in WF/WCF

Looking forward to the discussion!

-Rob

P.S. We plan on posting the source code for my demo when the CTP ships and Dan will post his source code soon as well.

This keynote was a joy for me to see…I hope you enjoy too.  I’m still polishing my PDC Talk (Thursday @ 8:30am), so this will be a brief post.

One blog comment about Guthrie’s keynote that I found from GeekTieGuy:

If you ever doubted that .NET and WPF were ready for “prime time”, doubt no longer. According to Scott Guthrie’s keynote, Visual Studio 2010 will have its user interface migrated to WPF. That almost blew my mind. Microsoft transitioning their bedrock developer tool to WPF - they wouldn’t do that lightly.

Watch an on-demand version of the keynote.  Here are some important points in the video:

WPF Momentum Video (0:00)

Ray Ozzie (2:00)

Windows7 - Steven Sinofsky (17:00)

I'm excited about the direction of Windows 7.

Building great Windows + Web Apps - Scott Guthrie (1:12:00)

Lots of good WPF/Silverlight Stuff in this section…including:

• An announcement that major pieces of Visual Studio 2010 will be built with WPF
• A really cool demo of the new VS code editor extensibility
• Announcing that Windows 7 will include .NET 3.5sp1 in the box.

Windows Live Services - David Treadwell (1:49:00)

Good Live Mesh demo here and more.

Office 14 (2:14:00)

Nice peek at Office apps working in the browser and collaborating with Desktop Office apps.

11/2/2008: Update…I’ve added links to the videos of those sessions…

I’ll be arriving in LA tonight and I’m looking forward to a great week with developers from around the world! The WPF team is delivering a number of sessions that should be of interest:

SESSION LIST (of most interest to WPF developers)

We’ll have a bunch of people from our team throughout the week  in the hand-on-labs, the lounge and the pavilion.  Please come tell us what you are doing, what you like that we are doing, and what we can do better.

If you want to drop by and chat with me at all, here are my current plans:

• Tuesday – 12:30-3:30 – working at the WPF booth.
• Wednesday – 6-9pm – Ask the Experts
• Thursday – 8:30am, Petree Hall CD – Doing the first ever “XAML focused” PDC talk with Daniel Roth.  I’m excited to be able to talk in detail about things that our team has been working on, without announcing, for the past 2 years!

Looking forward to seeing you. For those of you who aren’t going to be in LA, I’ll try to do a decent amount of blogging during the event or shortly after digging into more details about XAML.  Also, most of the content will be available online within a day of being presented.  I’ll try to add links.

Silverlight’s XAML Vocabulary Specification has been published!

On Monday (October 13th, 2008), a press release announced the availability of Silverlight 2.  Contained in that press release was the following mentions in bold about [MS-SLXV] Silverlight XAML Vocabulary Specification 2008 v0.9:

Continued Commitment to Openness and Interoperability

Microsoft also will release the Silverlight Control Pack and publish on MSDN the technical specification for the Silverlight Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) vocabulary. The SCP, which will augment the powerful built-in control set in Silverlight, will be released under the Microsoft Permissive License, an Open Source Initiative-approved license, and includes controls such as DockPanel, ViewBox, TreeView, Accordion and AutoComplete. The Silverlight XAML vocabulary specification, released under the Open Specification Promise (OSP), will better enable third-party ISVs to create products that can read and write XAML for Silverlight.

“The Silverlight Control Pack under the Microsoft Permissive License really addresses the needs of developers by enabling them to learn how advanced controls are authored directly from the high-quality Microsoft implementation,” said Miguel de Icaza, vice president, Engineering, Novell. “By using the OSP for the Silverlight vocabulary, they further solidify their commitment to interoperability. I am impressed with the progress Microsoft continues to make, and we are extremely satisfied with the support for Moonlight and the open source community.”

Scott Guthrie also metioned [MS-SLXV] in his “Silverlight 2 Released” blog post:

“We are also announcing today that we are releasing the Silverlight XAML vocabulary and schema under the Open Specification Promise (OSP), which enables anyone to create products that read and write XAML for Silverlight.”

What is in [MS-SLXV]?

1) Silverlight XAML Vocabulary: A list of XamlTypes (pp. 14-119) and XamlTextSyntaxes (pp. 120-132) that can be used in Silverlight XAML documents.  (you can think of this as the XAML Schema for Silverlight)

2) A list of any exceptions from [MS-XAML] XAML Object Mapping Specification 2006 that currently apply to Silverlight XAML documents.  (pp. 10-13)

How does this relate to [MS-XAML] and [MS-WPFXV]?

In March 2008, we shipped a v0.1 version of [MS-XAML] XAML Object Mapping Specification 2006 and [MS-WPFXV] WPF XAML Vocabulary Specification 2006, and we shipped v1.0 in June 2008.  You can think of [MS-XAML] as the specification of the XAML Language and [MS-WPFXV] as the WPF XAML Schema.

Most of [MS-SLXV] is a subset of what is specified in [MS-WPFXV].

What is next for [MS-SLXV]?

Our goal is to ship a v1.0 of [MS-SLXV] in the next 90-180 days.  We’d love to hear of any issues you find to ensure we can make it as complete as possible.

Happy tagging!

I’ve recently found that I like to modify an application while I can see it.  I’m working on some demos for the PDC08 XAML talk that Daniel Roth and I are doing.  Here is what I do:

1) Improve the app.

2) Run it.

3) Alt-PrintScreen

4) Paste it into OneNote

5) Use my tablet to mark up the next set of things that need to be done

Go back to 1.

Yesterday we did an API / conceptual model review with Mike Hillberg and John Gossman from WPF/Silverlight and Chris Anderson and Don Box from WCF/WF/etc…

We got a bunch of great feedback…and we’ve only made it through half the deck we had prepared.

To say thanks, I really should take them to lunch after the PDC.  Until then, to recognize the value of their feedback, I’m renaming a control in my PDC demo code from XamlNodeBox to DomBox.  :-)