Category: Avalon

Expression Interactive Designer’s First CTP!

The Expression Interactive Designer (aka “Sparkle”) CTP is out! This is an interactive visual designer for WPF, written in WPF. And it’s hot.

Here are some goodies:

When you try it out, be sure to let us (the WPF and Expression teams) know what you think!

WinFX January CTP

The WinFX January CTP just made it to MSDN. Here are links to all the goods:

Have fun. :)

And finally, if you are wondering why the Go-Live includes WF and WCF but not WPF, Arik Cohen (release/community PM extraordinaire, and one of the decision-makers on this topic), has posted some of the background that led to that decision. He also welcomes questions and comments about this if you have any.

Configuring Apache to Serve Avalon

The WinFX online SDK has a nifty little article that explains how to configure IIS to serve up WPF (aka Avalon) content. At the heart of this article is the fact that the following 5 extension-MIME type mappings need to be made:

Extension MIME Type
.manifest application/manifest
.xaml application/xaml+xml
.application application/x-ms-application
.xbap application/x-ms-xbap
.deploy application/octet-stream

The instructions in the article work like a charm if you’re (1) running IIS and (2) have administrative capabilities on your server.

Since I’m just paying a company in Texas for a bit of space on the web, I am (1) running Apache and (2) only have my little non-privileged user account. But if you are like me, do not despair! Eric, one of the developers on my team, realized that one could do the MIME-type mapping by adding the following lines to his/her .htaccess file:

AddType application/manifest manifest
AddType application/xaml+xml xaml
AddType application/x-ms-application application
AddType application/x-ms-xbap xbap
AddType application/octet-stream deploy

I just tried this out, et voila, now I can deploy XBAPs from my site. If you have the December CTP installed (if not, go get it here), here’s a Hello World for you to try out.

Update 2/9/06 11:45am: One of my co-workers reported that he had to put a period before the extension (e.g. “.xaml” rather than “xaml”) in his .htaccess file to get this working on his server. YMMV.

WPF Resource Loading

Ashish has some very informative recent posts about resource loading in WPF.

This stuff is important to just about anyone writing a WPF application, and I don’t think it’s hit MSDN yet. It’s a pretty nice model — you can just use URIs for everything, and there are abstractions that enable you to be agnostic of hosting model (browser/standalone), packaging model (loose/embedded), and site of origin (the location from which the application was deployed).