The Composite Application Guidance for WPF is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications. This guidance will help you design and build flexible composite WPF client applications – applications that use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together within the overall application.
Check it out!
Awhile ago I blogged about Microsoft releasing products protocol documentation which are essential design specifications. That was about 2 months ago and the documents are of beta version.
Today the official version 1 is out that it covers the following products.
Tim Heuer blogged about Wells Fargo adoption of WPF into their ATM user interface. For any technology, having a financial institution to adopt it in a customers facing application is really a vote of confidence that it is ready for critical mass.
With banks automating more of their businesses and putting them onto ATM and Internet banking, user experience is getting more crucial because of the dozens of services they offer, the screen property is limited. Old style ATM UI consist of just text is not usable to get customers to the service they looking for. WPF fits nicely here because of the deep integration with a strong application development platform like .NET and there is a good workflow synergy between the developers and designers to help boost productivity.
I just hope my local banks in Malaysia will realize this also and start putting investment into user experience around ATMs and Internet Banking.
thirteen23 (not 7eleven) is a design focus development company specializes in WPF application. On their website I found a few cool WPF application which not only looks nice but also showcase ability to connect to services on the cloud such as Windows Live Messenger.
Here are some samples which I think can be reused for your own enterprise app:
continuum: WPF based MSN Messenger
Foresight: A Vista gadget to help manage task + project
Mix08: a quick Vista application that lets you create your own conference schedule, keep track of times, and browse all the sessions.
While a lot focus has been on ASP.NET 3.5 enhancement lately (and Silverlight too), I was wondering what happened to Windows Presentation Foundation, which when Vista was launched Microsoft did a lot of cool prezzo on it (it runs on XP as well).
After some digging around, realize that Scott Guthrie and Mary Jo Foley did blogged about this enhancement. Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet event mentioned that the codename for this enhancement is known as ‘Arrowhead’. Scott’s blog post here exposed more details in the form of a roadmap, which among them are
- Improve setup experience for end users
- Performance Improvements
- New WPF Controls i.e. Datagrid, Datepicker and Ribbon
How is it going to be released is still a mistery as there are even some news out there about a SP1 released but still not official words yet. So got to cross our fingers and see how.
Every time when I apply leave just to relax, I would either go out of town or go learn something new. Most of the time I will end up learning a technology I wanted to check out for sometime. It could be a competing technology like Ruby on Rails, or something developed by Microsoft but not on my scorecard. That is exactly what I strike out to learn today, Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Expression Blend 2.
Just in case your don’t know Blend is part of Expression Studio and it is a tool for designers to create rich interactive user interface applications based on WPF or Silverlight technology.
So what I am keen to find out (because I did some talks on Smart Client recently)in Blend is how to create Smart Client application using WPF which has a lot of funky user experience. To get myself a jumpstart I refer to a new book, Foundation Expression Blend 2. The book is using September preview of Blend and some content might be outdated. Let me warn you first, the author of this book is a designer and not really a developer, and sometimes the comparison he made in the book is confusing for developers but they are OK for designers. For example, his non stop referencing of C# as the code behind language of XAML but never mention about Visual Basic. Commenting that CLR is just like Adobe’s Flash Player (CLR can do so much more!)
Just finished Chapter 5 (total 15 chapters) of the book and I found some of the stuff I like a lot about WPF or Blend:
Screenshots
Brush Transform
Local Brush Resources
Layout controls
Split view (Design view on top with XAML on the bottom)
Just came back from Krabi today and the first thing that caught my eye when I open up Live.com homepage for the 1st time since 5 days is a sample ERP applications that make practical use of Windows Presentation Foundation framework without just snapping just another colossal.
Look at it, it is a familar interface like our normal Windows Form app but it gives end users a fresh feel which I think they will be happy to open and use everyday. And if you want to integrate this into Office task panes as a WPF add in, you can do so easily with VSTO 2008 as I mentioned here.
By the way, should you try to get away by saying there is no ‘design’ guy in your team/ company, a company called reuxables is making one of their WPF theme available free in the form of a .dll file. Download it here.
Today the MSE team did a Tech Preview to fellow developers on Visual Studio 2008 which actually available for MSDN subscribers late last year and is available for sales now.
My session is about Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) 2008 and a lot of productivity enhancements have been put inside the package in this current version. They include but not limited to:
I demo a cool VSTO addin for Word 2007 hosting a WPF user control with colossal effect and acting as a client to a WCF services at the back end. The data access is done using LINQ for XML. After that I will publish
It is based on an article in MSDN Dec 2007 issue but the source codes there is not working for RTM version of VS 2008. Many thanks for fellow MS staff Andrew Whitechapel for making it work for VS2008 RTM.
You can download the slides and working version of the source code here. They are hosted on Windows Live Skiydrive/ Folders.
I will come out with a tutorial for the SharePoint Workflow later and also a VB9 version of the source code. So stay tuned. 🙂
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