AvraShow
Thursday, January 04, 2007
 
It's time to XAML ! If you have Windows XP and a fast Internet connection, you can start playing with WPF.

With any new technology, there are early adopters, there are late adopters, and there are those who only use what is preinstalled, preconfigured for them.

Generally, I wait until tools support any technology rather than use Notepad to explore the concepts and constructs. But waiting for the next version of Visual Studio and the Expression tools (the ones not released yet) does not preclude anyone from running xaml and learning about WPF.

There are several fine books out about WPF. I bought one (Chris Sells), have another on order (Adam Nathan, full-color illustrations and code coloring should make it easier to associate the xaml code and its rendering), and downloaded a prerelease "rough cuts" version (Chris Anderson).

Now that the .NET 3.0 framework has been officially released, I could have downloaded it. I tried an experiment to see what would happen.

I created a first.xaml file using Notepad (this example is copied from the Chris Anderson book):
<FlowDocument xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation'>
<Paragraph>Welcome to my document!</Paragraph>
</FlowDocument>

I noticed the icon on the desktop had a WPF shield rather than an unknown file extension icon, so I double-clicked it and Windows XP offered to download the .NET framework. I clicked OK, the .NET Framework (3.0) was downloaded, and then IE7 launched and downloaded a little viewer and the text in the Paragraph tag was displayed in IE7 with a zoomable slider control in the lower right corner.

So now I can start playing with xaml examples and seeing the results until the Visual Studio team officially releases something official I won't have to uninstall.

For Windows Vista, with the .NET 3.0 Framework already installed, you can just double-click on a xaml file to view it (I expect that xaml will soon be standardized with no capital letters, or maybe just a capital X). IE7 will still need to download a little viewer before displaying the file.
 
Comments: Post a Comment
Words about people and things and ideas that you might find useful, interesting and enjoyable.

ARCHIVES
December 2003 / July 2005 / August 2005 / September 2005 / October 2005 / November 2005 / March 2006 / May 2006 / June 2006 / July 2006 / August 2006 / September 2006 / October 2006 / November 2006 / December 2006 / January 2007 / February 2007 / March 2007 / April 2007 / May 2007 / June 2007 / July 2007 / August 2007 / September 2007 / October 2007 / November 2007 / December 2007 / January 2008 / February 2008 / March 2008 / April 2008 / May 2008 / June 2008 / July 2008 / August 2008 / September 2008 / October 2008 / November 2008 / December 2008 / February 2009 / March 2009 / May 2009 / July 2009 / August 2009 / September 2009 / October 2009 / November 2009 / December 2009 / January 2010 / February 2010 / March 2010 / April 2010 / May 2010 / December 2010 / September 2011 /

Subscribe!

Paste this into in your newsreader URL and choose "Subscribe":
http://feeds.feedburner.com/avrashow


Powered by Blogger