This was announced at MIX 08 and the product team has put its first BETA out already! 

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the superset of Silverlight used for building rich desktop experiences, has its third major update.   The .NET Framework team today released the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1, both as BETA and downloadable for free - offering a ton of features in ASP.NET, AJAX, Visual Studio, VB.NET and C#. 

Scott covers it all in his marathon post here and Tim Sneath does a detailed write-up of the WPF features here. I thought I will highlight the key things that excited me (and had been waiting to talk about!):

Graphics Enhancements in WPF

Hardware accelerated Shadow and Blur effects: Pixel Shader effects that allow designers/developers on WPF to just add a line of code to get shadow and blur effects.  The best part is that these automatically run hardware-accelerated. Best part: The effects model is designed in a way that developers can create their own re-usable effects.  A detailed write-up of the effects model and a tutorial on creating your own effects is available here.

Improvements in Text Rendering, Animations, 2D Graphics and Startup:  A whole lot of performance enhancements have been made, specially around text rendering in 3D scenes and with regular 2D animations.  Performance has also been significantly enhanced for the cold startup time (when you load a WPF application for the first time).

HLSL and DirectX integration: DirectX developers can use HLSL and Direct3D integration in WPF, allowing for DirectX scenes to be rendered on WPF controls!  This is huge for companies and developers that already have existing investments in DirectX and want to port any of it to WPF.

New Controls:  WPF will have three new controls that are bound to be popular with developers instantaneously.  A really rich DataGrid control that provides the most often used tabular data view, a WebBrowser control that will let you host browser-based applications in a WPF window and (hold your breath) the Office Ribbon control with full adherence to the Ribbon-UI guidelines!!  That will enable developers to just build Ribbon-menu based applications with the least effort!

Deployment

OK, now the bigger part!  One of the bane of WPF applications was the necessity of a huge .NET Framework installed on the system.  The .NET Framework 3.5 redistributable is 197MB making it very hard to bootstrap to a WPF application that is being installed. 

Introducing the .NET Framework Client Profile.  This is a much smaller version of the runtime (expected to be only around 26MB!!!) that does not contain several of the server components (for example: ASP.NET) and only includes the assemblies required for client applications, namely - the .NET Framework core, WPF, WCF and Windows Forms.   This also comes with a bootstrapper (~200KB) which can be included into your client applications.  The bootstrapper will check for .NET Framework availability and then download the .NET Framework Client Profile setup package if it found that .NET Framework is not installed already.    The bootstrapper is also smartly written to look at only incremental components - for instance, if you already had .NET 3.0 and your application required .NET 3.5, it would only download the incremental components, hence reducing the download size much further.  Note that you will have to explicitly configure your application to require only the client runtime components while building the application.

Remember that since most Windows XP systems already have .NET 2.0 or higher, this should significantly reduce the download size for .NET Framework.  This is probably the best update for WPF since its first release!!!

BETA 1 Notes

Much as I want to try all the great stuff immediately, remember that there are some incompatibilities of Visual Studio SP1 with the Silverlight 2 BETA Tools for Visual Studio.  This will cause your Visual Studio Silverlight development experience to break.  A new version of the Silverlight Tools will be released soon (see Scott's blog for more information).

Also remember that this is the BETA and not all features mentioned above (like Ribbon UI) are immediately available.  See Scott's blog for details.   But hey, we've made the announcements.  And Scott's team has been pretty kick-ass in shipping stuff really fast!

Yesterday was fun.  I had been invited to introduce Microsoft Silverlight 2 at the Flex User Group in Bangalore.  I met a whole bunch of cool people and was overall great fun talking to them.

I finally got to meet Mrinal Wadhwa, the champion of the Flex UG in Bangalore. We had been chatting away on email for a while and it was good to finally see more of the person than his Facebook profile!

Supreet Singh, my partner in crime began proceedings to a fully packed room talking a little about User Experience.  Just a little because the room was full with developers.  So after that it was all demos and geek talk.

As expected, the conversation very soon got into a comparison between Flex and Silverlight 2.  I did not want to really compare, but had wanted the audience to look at Silverlight 2 as a technology holistically.  But I guess that is hard for anybody who's working on Flex day in and out.  We had some interesting discussions about the evolution of Silverlight.

The DeepZoom demos were really well received.  I was a little surprised to get the entire audience applauding the Hard Rock Memorabilia gallery and a few other DeepZoom demos I had with me.  I had a question from Mrinal about uploading images to build a DeepZoom collection and I had said I would answer that later in the session - I intended to show the DeepZoom tool before doing that and never got the time in the end.  So if you still have the question, do check out MS Live Labs PhotoZoom and learn how to build your own DeepZoom collections here.

When I showed the designer-developer collaboration using Blend and Visual Studio, there was some discussion in the audience about the whole workflow.  We discussed about actual workflow of projects today which involved a lot of raster prototyping in Photoshop and then actual slicing/dicing to make the CSS/HTML that can be used in Flex (or regular web pages).  We were running out of time for a more elaborate discussion, but there was some good feedback that raster is still very important to have in the overall designer workflow.  I did mention that designers would use raster even in Silverlight projects.  I could be way off here, but I got the impression that regular Flash work still used a lot of raster and did not leverage the obvious benefits of vector.  Some people also argued that it was easier to get raster images than vector images and did not mind sacrificing the fidelity.  Maybe an offshoot of not having more designers in the room!

Another interesting discussion was around performance.  It obviously seemed that the biggest concern to Flash/Flex developers was performance and memory utilization of applications.  In the Silverlight world, the CLR probably makes a huge difference in terms of performance.  I did demonstrate some differences in the JavaScript and C# execution using the Silverlight 2 Chess application. I also think that though the underlying framework plays a huge role in determining performance of your applications, it is also a lot dependent on the quality of code.  For Silverlight applications, there are some tips and tricks on building high-performance apps and if you are exploring this, you should check out Seema Ramchandani's talk here.  Check out her blog and you'll learn a lot of what happens under the hoods.

There was some discussion around security and I had promised links detailing Silverlight security architecture in detail. The Silverlight security cheat sheet is the best way to get started.

We also talked a little about Expression Design and since we had the room for a limited time, we couldn't get to seeing more of the Expression toolset.  Remember that you need Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview for Silverlight 2 (there are 3 versions on the Expression web site that is bound to get a beginner confused).

Finally, I thank everyone, especially Mrinal for inviting us over and giving us a chance to introduce Silverlight.  I got some good pieces of feedback and will pass them on internally.  I think overall there was interest and given that many RIA development concepts were already well-known to the Flex folks, it should be easy for them to give Silverlight a shot.  Everything you need for getting started on Silverlight is available at www.silverlight.net. 

Remember, there will be judgements, criticisms, praises and reviews all over. The best way to make a judgement is to try the stuff yourself.  And if you did not like what you saw, give us feedback.  If you liked what you saw, spread the word! :)

I presented a webcast today as part of our ongoing series of precursor webcasts to the Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Launch.  If you have not heard of the launch, you should head right away to www.heroeshappenhere.co.in and register yourself in one of the several hundred cities that we are taking this launch to in India.

I had a good audience and also felt that there was a lot of genuine interest in Smart Client Development.  That is not so much of a surprise given that more and more applications have a hybrid software+services approach to leverage best of both worlds - desktop and web.

My session focused on 4 different buckets of Smart Client Development:

Smart Client Applications do not have a single definition.  My view of these applications are that they are primarily desktop applications, that can have a few other "smart" features, such as:

• Rich presentation providing users with a very good experience
• Flexible UI that can be modified and keep improving over time (pretty much like web applications do)
• Local data caching for master data, offline transactional data, etc.
• Protection of some sort for the local data - both from security and from data corruption
• Synchronization of data when "online" with conflict resolution, if necessary
• Seamless deployment features such as auto-updates making it also easy for the software publisher to publish new versions

Most of the above are a breeze with components and frameworks that are available today - and with Visual Studio 2008, development of most of these becomes even more easier.

The webcast showed how you can leverage the following technologies.  I am not going deep into the demos here, because there were many, many steps involved and I am sure it will be tedious for you to read as well as have a high chance of missing something.   I will point you to resources, including the recording of my webcast, to watch these instead.

The technologies I talked about today are:

Windows Presentation Foundation / Windows Forms

WPF is a great way of creating rich applications with vector graphic elements, 2D, 3D, document-oriented applications, etc.  Windows Forms, a technology that has been around longer, continues to be a great technology to build desktop applications that forms-oriented, task-oriented (like a taskbar app, control panel, etc.) and do not require all the richness of WPF. 

A more detailed discussion on which technology to use when is something I posted in this post a while ago. The best part is that the interoperability between these two is fantastic - both provide a "control" that can host the other into one of their "windows" - you can put a WPF control into a Windows Form or vice-versa.  This means even existing Windows Forms Applications can start using some WPF richness for new features that require data visualization of high interactivity.

Microsoft Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008 combine to provide a rich, seamless designer-developer process for creating these applications.  Blend provides all the designer tools whereas VS 2008 provides all the developer power.

There are also new enhancements to WPF with .NET Framework 3.5 and you can find the entire list here. A video describing the features can also be found here.

Scott Guthrie also blogged about an update to WPF that we are planning to release later this year which will add more flexibility in deployment options and also provide performance boosts.

If you are a beginner on WPF, the community website is www.windowsclient.net and the best place to start is the WPF Video Gallery. 

SQL Server Compact Edition

Another cool piece of technology I discussed today was SQL Server Compact Edition (or SQL Server CE). 

SQL Server CE is the compact edition of the SQL database and was used in a prior version in the Windows Embedded/Mobile world because of the necessity of small footprint there.  That technology has evolved now to provide a common base technology called SQL Server CE that you can still use in that world, but can also use in building PC applications.  In here, you can actually embed a full database within your application and query data using ADO.NET with the same ease as you would if you were using SQL Server Express or higher versions SQL Server itself.

The neat thing about using SQL Server CE is that you do not need to have SQL Server (of any kind) installed on the client system.  So it is a true database engine embed that doesn't need any administrative privileges or huge local services to be running.

You can learn more and download SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 today from http://www.microsoft.com/sql/compact

A video tutorial of using SQL Server CE with a slightly older version (3.1) is available here and should get you introduced to the basic concepts.

Microsoft Sync Framework

Probably the coolest demo (at least according to the presenter :)) was showing off the Microsoft Sync Framework CTP Refresh 1.

Microsoft Sync Framework is one of those frameworks that you have to use to believe!  It is unbelievably simple for the enormously huge tasks it accomplishes.  It can do any kind of synchronization - between PCs, between PC/mobile/device, between client and local server, between client and Internet server, between databases - anything.  Ask it to sync and it obeys!

With Visual Studio 2008, the integration is unbelievable. I did a whole demo of local client/server sync between a SQL CE database and a SQL Server database running on my system with part data locally cached, part directly accessed - all of it with just ONE LINE of code and in well under 15 minutes.

You might want to give it a spin yourself by downloading it from www.msdn.com/sync - you will need both the Microsoft Sync Framework and Microsoft Sync Services for ADO.NET v2.

Excellent video tutorials (albeit a bit lengthy) are available here, here and here.   I used a large part of the third video for my demo today.  The videos also contain customizations you can make to the Sync APIs that I did not have time to cover today.

ClickOnce

Finally we talked about ClickOnce APIs in .NET Framework for easy publishing and auto-update.  I have uploaded the code I used today along with the presentation (link below).   The simple demo I used today was based on this video that can walk you through the steps all over again.  

Presentation and Demos

You can download today's presentation and all code samples I did today (finished samples) from here.  (The presentation is in PPTX format - you might want to download a viewer here if you don't have Office 2007). I do encourage you to go through the video links I mentioned above as well to get more information - I was talking too many technologies in the 1.5 hour session - many more details are available in the videos that are dedicated to these topics.

The entire webcast on-demand recording is available here.  You will need to register to download this, if you haven't already attended the webcast.

So there!  My part of the promise to post all the links and the pptx/code is done.  So now there's nothing stopping you from building awesome Smart Client Applications!! 

Happy coding!

Developers and designers I meet ask me one perennial question - "What's coming in 2?" 

Well, some clues popping out - specially this one by Jesse Liberty. 

I tend to give another piece of advice to developers/designers.  Expression Blend 2 December Preview is available (and has been for a while) and designers should download it today and start working on Silverlight 1.0 sites.  It gives you a good grasp of the tool and gets you setup for designing with more features when Silverlight 2 releases.  You also could try your hand at WPF projects and get a hang of some WPF data-binding features as well.

Developers on the other hand should look at the coding aspects of WPF and can also get familiarized with the XAML DOM using the Silverlight 1.0 SDK.  Most of the concepts of XAML and vector drawing, brushes, etc. are explained very well in the documentation and samples that come along with the SDK.   Get it today and learn it inside out.  If you've already done that, revisit it to see what topics you haven't familiarized yourselves with.

Other than the books Jesse Liberty put up on his post, I'd also recommend Laurence Moroney's excellent introductory book on Silverlight 1.0

If you are a new developer to Silverlight, this is one book you should get!    

Exciting time for us here!!!!   Here are some things to get you started with MIX fever! :)  Loads of great prizes and goodies to win - so go ahead and do some stuff!

Hear ye, hear ye!  MIX08 to debut the first ever MIX UX Track which is 3 days of solid content dedicated to creatives / designers.  Lou Carbone, David Armano, Dan Roam, Kim Lenox and others will speak.  In conjunction with Adaptive Path, the User Experience track is just one of the many great reasons for all types of designers and creative professionals to attend MIX this year.  http://visitmix.com/2008/mixux.aspx

The deadline for this year’s CSS contest, RESTYLE, has been extended.  Folks can still restyle the MIX08 Homepage and win a pass to MIX08, 3 nights at the Venetian, $$ and more, more, more! http://visitmix.com/2008/restyle/

Have you been listening to The Signal?  Each week a new episode debuts featuring a speaker or MIX crew member talking about some of the upcoming coolness happening at MIX08.  Listen to their interviews with Molly Holzschlag, Kip Kniskern, Jonathan Snook and others as we countdown to Vegas.  Got a question for the show?  Email signalm@microsoft.com or leave a voice-mail message at (425) 703-4650. http://visitmix.com/blogs/TheSignal/

Perhaps you remembered last year’s MIX, in which we featured Flotzam, a WPF screensaver mash-up that showed MIX07 feeds from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and blogs. Well, we are doing it again this year with a twist: we are running a contest and will feature community created skins of the application on the big screen and on the screensavers of the computers available to attendees at the show.  The best skin will win an XBOX 360.  Entering the contest is easy: everything you need to know can be found here http://www.visitmix.com/blogs/News/403/ including links to screencasts and instructions that show how easy it is to do the restyle.  

If you are familiar with WPF development, you will know that one of the most useful features is the ability of WPF UI development is to use Styles and Resources.  Basically, it is a way of creating skins for your controls, like CSS would do for HTML, and then applying those skins.

What this basically means is, like in the CSS scenario, WPF controls can be skinned and re-skinned without having to change any of the code and functionality.  The entire look and feel is well-separated from the presentation layout.

Dax Pandhi and Nukeation have pulled off some fantastic stuff just leveraging that.  This was in the works for a while and I was always excited to know about this project.  Dax has been gracious to give me a full license of the product as well, and it looks wonderful. (Thanks Dax).

In return, I thought I should let everyone know that reuxables is really a smart way to jazz up your WPF applications by leveraging some of the fantastic design that Nukeation churns out.

Check it out at http://reuxables.nukeation.com. 

Way to go Dax!

A while ago, Dax Pandhi, a Microsoft UX fanatic as far as I know him, had several rants about all the attention that Silverlight is getting, almost undermining the value of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).   He had strong concerns that though Silverlight is a cool technology, people should not lose focus on WPF.  I think the Silverlight buzz is not all hype.  Like I say in many of my forums, Silverlight is one of the coolest technologies from Microsoft since .NET.  Simply because by taking .NET into the web browser and across platforms, it opens up a Pandora's box of possibilities!  I believe Silverlight will get faster adoption than WPF, because WPF requires the underlying platform to be XP SP 2 or Vista - with .NET 3.0 installed - which in many countries, including India, is a very small share of PCs.  However, Silverlight has much lesser requirements and should catch up much faster.  Note that Silverlight also has OS requirements to be Windows XP and above (with support for Windows 2000 most likely coming later), but yet does not require you to have .NET 3.0 installed.

With all the choices around now, I thought I'll take some time to write a post on how you should choose the best UX technology for your applications.

User Experience is one of the key factors for any software application to succeed.  Be it the desktop or the web or a device, UX plays an important role in establishing an emotional connection and a comfort or familiarity with the end-user.  This increases customer loyalty to the product/service and if your product knows how to make money from customer loyalty, you'll probably make a lot of it.   All known things.

Delivering great UX requires several steps.  Some of these include user behavior analysis, information architecture, blueprints, navigational models, etc.  All of these then get translated into visual design and code.  Design and code eventually decide how the UX vision is translated into the actual software.  Traditionally, limitations of platform and tools have made very rich designs (the kind with 3D, Documents, Multimedia) a distant dream for average developers.  Regular Forms-style applications are the desktop trend and on the Web, it is content mixed with form controls in various layouts.

Very few technologies were able to bring fluid design into the desktop arena - DirectX, GDI+, etc. being some of those - and even few on the Web - Java, ActiveX and Flash.  Microsoft's investments into UX technologies has been aimed at reducing the barrier (both platform and tools) to high levels of User Experience.  With the release of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for the desktop (on Windows Vista, XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003), it is now possible to think of never before UX possibilities. 

On the web, AJAX has added a shot in the arm to traditional web applications, making them far more responsive and intuitive to use.  Silverlight steps this up many levels by allowing rich interactive application interfaces to be built for the Web, interspersing with the functionality of HTML, ASP.NET and AJAX.  Silverlight also takes it cross-browser and cross-platform (IE, Firefox, Safari on Windows/Mac).

Again, all known things.

So how does one approach UX in this new world of multiple possibilities?  Based on who your end-users are, how they will use the application, what product/service you are delivering and what platforms you are targeting, there are multiple options:

• You want a rich application that is installed by end-users on their desktop PCs.  An example would be Microsoft Office or Visual Studio.  You want the application to be available to the user at all times, have a very rich front-end, lots of client code and want to take full advantage of the client processing power.

Your technology choices:

Windows Forms - if it is a simple application like a data-entry application. 

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) - if it is an application that will use some rich graphical features such as vector drawings, multimedia, visual styles, etc.

• You want a rich application that is not installed by end-users but is available to them on-demand.  An example could be a stock trading analysis tool with rich comparison features, visualizations, charts, etc. with constant changes in the features that are added (which is why you don't want users to install it).

Your technology choices:

XAML Browser Applications (XBAP) - which is still WPF, but a deployment model that delivers WPF applications off an URL, downloads the application, sandboxes it and runs it within the browser window (with an actual process - preshost.exe - executing it)

ClickOnce - With Windows Forms, you could achieve this with ClickOnce technology.  Again a deployment model, but if your application did not want heavily rich features, you could opt for lighter Windows Forms applications.  (ClickOnce for WPF applications is synonymous with XBAP)

• You are creating a web application with standard features, but would like better responsiveness and usability

Your technology choices:

ASP.NET with AJAX - the easiest way to take your current web applications and "AJAXify" them is to migrate to ASP.NET 2.0 and AJAX.  Harish has been posting a lot around this lately and I encourage you to check his blog.

• You are creating a web application with several advanced features.  An example could be a web application with rich graphical visualizations, ink support, vector drawings, etc.

Your technology choices:

Silverlight - a great technology fit for developing those web applications that require high levels of user interaction and rich visualization.

• You are creating a desktop application that talks to Internet services.  An example is a locally hosted news reader application that displays news in a rich format on the desktop, but needs an Internet connection to download fresh news.

Your technology choices:

WPF Smart Clients - Basically these are regular desktop WPF applications but with several features to detect if you are connected to the Internet, download data when connected, locally cache data, synchronize data when connected, etc.   Smart Clients are a concept that Microsoft has had for a few years now and the basic design patterns remain the same with WPF as well.  A new technology codenamed "Acropolis" and the Smart Client Software Factory are some useful tools if you are building these kind of applications.

I have only highlighted some of the common scenarios of applications.  There are many more - including Tablet PC development, Speech interface development, mobile device development, etc. that I am not going into. 

When you look at the overall UX technologies available, and plot them based on their capabilities today, you get the following:

This is the whole UX map that is available today on the Microsoft platform.  So go ahead and kick some ass with snazzy user experiences!