Wednesday, April 12, 2006

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.NET Community days - day 1

My rough notes from today's WinForms track below.


.NET Compact Framework 2.0


The best presentation of the day: Fabio Santino which had -one- slide: Agenda: Q&A.
I have developed several applications with .NET CF so most of it was old news, but Fabio is a great presenter so enjoyed it anyway. I was particularly pleased to see that the Device Emulator in Visual Studio 2005 has improved a lot:



  • it can run multiple emulators at the same time

  • it uses a Strong ARM emulator so you can install standard pocket pc applications from the internet so you can make your own ultra portable personal pc

I didn’t know it, but the Phone edition emulators have the phone number +14250010001 so you can send/receive SMSs and simulate phone calls with the emulator


ClickOnce deployment
The previous solutions for easy deployment, like the "no touch deployment", had a lot of drawbacks so it was interesting to get some more information on ClickOnce which tries to solve most of the problems:



  • installing and running applications without being an administrator. This is particularly interesting for apps that use com objects

  • automatic updates

  • rollback to an old version in case the new version fails

Solving the problems leads to some "compromises" that not everybody in the audience agreed with but I think they are as good as they can be without installing the app the normal way. The application and data are stored in versioned directories in the documents and settings directory of each user. This makes rollbacks possible using the Add/remove software applet in the control panel. It means more disk usage as each user will have a couple of copies (current + backup) of each application and data set. On neat thing is that ClickOnce is able to run com objects without registering them on the computer using the " Interop option: Isolated=true" option on Windows XP and later


Windows Presentation Foundation
I have followed various blogs on WinFX without ever getting the WinFX bug. The demos and discussions today changed that. I have several ideas of games/tools for kids that I have been trying to implement in Macromedia Flash. I got as far as installing the demo and reading parts of a manual before I realized that Flash is a very different world for me as the terms, and especially the IDE, is completely different from everything I have worked with so far. WPF looks like the perfect thing for me as the "graphical designer" part is separated in an external xml (XAML) file that defines the look of elements, transitions (move object A from X to Y in Z seconds), styles etc.


It looks like Microsoft has Flash killer with Expression Interactive Designer. The WPF Everywhere version should run in web browsers on other platforms like Mac, Linux(?), Solaris(?)


Blogs of the presenters



The slides and material should be on the Community Days site after Easter

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