Sean Gerety

I'd like the Sparkling Cider please...

At PDC 2005 I got to play around with Sparkle at the Hands on Lab.  I've got Cider installed with VS 2005 on Server 2003, via the December CTP of WinFX.  While I'm thrilled that we are finally getting are hands on the design tools for XAML.  I have to say that I lean more towards using Sparkle.  

Here are some things that I would like to see in Cider:

A split screen view of the Design View and the XAML view (think XAMLPad).  I'd also like to see a full palette of controls.  Simple things like an ellipse to other controls like the inkcanvas are missing.   

When you do something bad in your XAML and then pop over to the Design view you'll get a nice reminder that you've done something wrong. 

Other gotchas are the fact that you may move a control or change a value in design time and you'll have to go fix it in your XAML view.  I'd also like to see the visual tree.  That way it's easy to select and access your controls.

As I play around with it a little more, I'll blog about it.

User Experience vs. Marketing

One of the key points for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF aka Avalon) is to focus on User Experience.  Hopefully software product companies will spend less on marketing and advertising and more on design and development.  Why? 

Because User Experience always trumps marketing and advertising experience.

Marketing and advertising is about how product owners want you to think the your experience will be when using their product.  User Experience is the actual experience with a product. 

Think about what companies are telling you:

Shoes - "Wear our shoes and you'll be a (insert activity here) superstar"

Clothes - "Wear our clothes and you'll be in style"

Food - "Eat this and you'll be thinner"

Drink - "Drink this and women will flock to you"

Movies - "This is the best movie of the year"

Hardware - "Carry our MP3 player and you'll finally be cool"

The User Experience can range from "That movie sucked" to "I love these new hiking boots". 

So when you're writing that next piece of software and think about User Experience.  Great User Experience will create consumer driven marketing versus company driven marketing.  Good user experience creates stronger binds.

Here are some other people talking about good User Experience.

http://www.goodexperience.com/

http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnlong/html/vistatopten.asp

December CTP for WinFX

New WinFX bits for those cold winter nights! 

Here's the Vista and WinFX beta page.  http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getthebeta/default.aspx

If you've got the November bits hanging around, here's the unistall tool.

WinFX Runtime Components - December CTP (Works with Vista, Windows XP sp2, and Server 2003 sp1) 

Windows SDK for the December 2005 CTP (The like on the related links page points you to the November CTP SDK)

This works with VS.Net 2005 (Release) 

Enjoy!

I can't believe I forgot this link!  Be sure to download the WinFX development tools (Cider)!  Here's the Overview snipped from the site.

<snip>

Overview The Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Community Technology Preview - WinFX™ Development Tools (CTP) provides developers with support for building WinFX applications using the final released version of Visual Studio 2005. This support includes XAML Intellisense support through schema extensions for the editor, project templates for the Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code named “Avalon”) and the Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code named “Indigo”), and WinFX SDK documentation integration. New to this CTP is a preview of the Visual Designer for Windows Presentation Foundation (code name "Cider"), more information can be found on the Channel 9 Wiki site for Cider. This CTP does not include a graphical design surface for the Windows Communication Foundation.

</snip>

Sweet.

OT - New Cocktail Created

Today we created a new cocktail and with every new discovery you get to name it.  So we decided to call it the "Nasty Librarian".  So after coming up with the name we thought "hmmm, something reserved with a wild side."  Here's the recipe.  Enjoy.

Mix and serve the following over ice in a rocks glass.

One part scotch (of your choice) [one shot]

One part Drambuie [one shot]

One half part Amaretto [half shot]

PDC to November CTP XAML tool

I was working on some XAML projects from the PDC demo's and was having problems with the PDC XAML misbehaving latest Avalon (WPF) bits.  If you are, try using the "mini-language" fix tool from Adam Smith on the Avalon Team.  It can be found on Karsten Januszewski's blog as part of the code samples. 

Sean