“Bill Wagner takes us through using the more extensible Updater Application Block to automatically install and maintain applications. He also discusses the importance of validation and how to use post processing commands.”
Mark Levison of Databeacon talks about the first commercial-grade .NET No-Touch Deployment application to be deployed over the internet (at least, as far as he and I know). I asked Mark what his motivations were for using a smart client instead of a web app. These were his reasons:
“Integration with Desktop – export to excel, word, send to mail recipient, etc.
“The user never has to wait for a round trip to the server. Once the application is up and running everything is done locally, the user is never left waiting by a suddenly slow internet connection.
“Our application gets a full blown window with its menu and toolbar, we’re not stuck inside of IE.
“Uses the clients CPU do all of work. Our application is graphically and sometimes computationally intensive, if we did all of this work server side, we would eventually run into scaling problems.”
Congrats Mark and Databeacon. This is but the beginning of much greater things to come.
NOTE: I don’t know if this was exuberance at making the instructions for running the sample easy or not, but you should absolutely not “[u]se the Microsoft .NET Framework wizard to grant full trust to trusted sites.” Trusted or not, you should not award any code any more permission than it needs. For instructions on how to build an MSI setup for configuring a NTD client for just the right amount of permissions until you can use ClickOnce (which handles permission elevation much better than NTD), you can read this article on the topic.
My Windows Forms partner in crime, Mike Weinhardt, pointed out to me this morning that the Windows Forms team has posted their way cool Windows Forms 2.0 samples, including:
Design Mode Dialog- Mike Harsh This is a sample dialog component that allows any form to go into “design mode” at runtime. This component highlights the new, easy to consume, designer infrastructure APIs in Whidbey and has the same usage pattern as other common dialogs.
Stock Quote Chart Generator- Joe Stegman This app uses the sample asynchronously polls a web service for stock quotes and charts the results over a customizable time period.
MSN Messenger Clone- Scott Morrison This is a Windows Forms app that emulates the functionality of MSN Messenger.
Internet Explorer Clone- Joe Stegman This is a Windows Forms app that looks like Internet Explorer 6 and uses the new WebBrowser control.
Windows Forms RSS Portal- Joe Stegman This is portal type application that aggregates RSS feeds asynchronously.
Outlook 2003 Clone- Joe Stegman This is a UI front end that has the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook 2003.
Rob’s been talking about fixing various parts of XAML lately, which is exactly the kind of result you want when a bunch of folks work with your technology and give you feedback on it. So, things will change and get better.
However, Rob isn’t telling us just want the changes are likely to be because, as he puts it, “I’m not going into great detail in the description of our fix because I’d prefer to be the first company to ship our design. :-)”
Like Rob, I find this amusing. I grew up in a period of Microsoft’s life where they were much derided for “leveraging” ideas from the rest of the world and repurposing them for use in Windows (or *as* Windows in some cases). Now that MS has caught up and passed most of the rest of the world in many crucial areas of technology, it’s nice to see us grow into the role of thought leader instead of follower.
If I’m doing the calculations correctly, Ryan Dawson is not yet old enough to drink, but he still manages to give the best, most direct, most thorough feedback of anyone in the WinFX/Longhorn developer community (Ian Griffiths is a close second, but he’s got that English polite thing going for him, so it’s hard to know just how much he’s really complaining : ). Ryan’s built apps to test the various pillars and makes his complaints very clear, as in this post about Avalon 3D.
That’s not to say that I agree with everything he says or that the product team agrees, but I wish I had 100 more Ryan Dawson’s banging on the pillars and complaining loudly and clearly so that the product teams can get some crystal clear feedback on what works, what doesn’t and what developers want. If you don’t have a blog, get one or post your complaints on the newsgroups. Come on! Tell us why we suck and what to do to stop sucking! You know you want to. : )
