ASP.NET DevConnections '07 - Day 1 - WPF/E

As the first "official" day of the conference (more on the pre-conference session later), today was chocked full of presentations by some Microsoft guys on the new products coming out to aid in delivering .net solutions to our customers.  It started out with a presentation by Scott Guthrie on "WPF/E".  He made it very clear that "WPF/E" is a codename and not the "real" name of the product.

WPF/E:

WPF/E is a new platform/development language built on .net 3.0 that allows you to build flash-like applications with animation, video, etc. that processes all on the client-side.  For development, you use essentially a declarative xml file format that tells the run-time how to process the animation.  This allows for incredible flexibility and the ability of complete dynamic animations.  You can see a sample of something already out there that uses the beta at WindowsVista.si.  It's a site that is a vista emulator.  It was written by some enterprising young college students that manually wrote all the XAML to generate the animations.  We don't have to do that, though, because Microsoft has come out with another tool called "Blend".  The UI for this tool targets a lot of the Designers out there but it is truly an incredible tool - allowing animations to be done quickly - and since everything is stored and compiled from the XAML format - it's VERY easy to tweak and change things on the fly.

Using WPF/E - you can easily display video to the client in 2 ways - via a URL or using Windows Media Server (free download for Windows Server).  Also, since it runs on the client, it uses a vector graphics engine that renders things in a device independent way - so it will ALWAYS be optimized for the particular user's computer.

It's interoperability with other MS languages are also where it will shine.  Since it essentially sits on a page like MS Virtual Earth, you can easily combine it with surrounding HTML.  Then, when you have a <DIV> you would like it to render the animation into, you would just include the ID of that DIV in a javascript constructor to instantiate the animation object.  It's very cool stuff.  And also, since it follows the Virtual Earth model, it's VERY interoperable with Javascript and .net technologies.  Wow!!!

All in all, a very very cool product offering that I know I'm going to be playing with a lot more. 

i'm sure that Scott Guthrie is going to add his presentation to his blog soon - when he does, I'll post the direct link here.

 

Published 27 March 07 12:57 by Greg
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Comments

# iamalive said on March 28, 2007 12:34 AM:

Well, this windowsvista.si site was not written by college students, but by a commercial company payed by Microsoft.

WPF/E is not WPF, so it is not based on .NET 3.0. WPF/E has standalone player, independent of .NET.

That site could not be written in XAML, as content is generated dynamicaly, so it can only be done by javascript. XAML can be used only for fixed number of predefined elements. Such a complex animations are not possible by XAML, they are implemented in javascript.

# Greg said on March 28, 2007 7:06 AM:

Interesting.  I've seen reported in numerous places - from Scott Guthrie's keynote - that it was indeed written by college students.  Whether those college students also work for a commercial company in Slovenia - I do not know.

Good point of clarification on WPF/E - That said, though, there is a lot of interoperability with .net and VS.net - which I think, is part of the Orcas build, thus making it built upon (actually, I believe) .net 3.5.  

Good insight on the XAML/Javascript question.  I think  that when it comes to some of the animations, you may be correct - but when it comes to the actual rendering of the background, icons, etc. - I think that was done in XAML.  I don't know for certain, though.

Thanks for reading!

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