Beta 2 signals the beginning of the final drive towards RTM for WinFX:

• Readme
• Runtime Components
• SDK
• VS05 Extensions for Avalon and Indigo
• VS05 Extensions for Workflow

Enjoy.

The February ’06 WinFX CTP cometh:

• WinFX RC February CTP Readme
• WinFX Runtime Components
• Windows SDK
• Visual Studio Community Technology Preview - Development Tools for WinFX® (aka Fidalgo)
• VS Extensions for WorkFlow
• Ed’s Big List of WCF Breaking Changes
• Karsten’s Big List of WPF Breaking Changes

Enjoy!

Suddenly, I think Larry O’Brien is smart:

“The book, in this case, is Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths’ ‘Programming Windows Presentation Foundation.’ Sells and Griffiths are two top-notch authors, who separately wrote two of the better books on Windows Forms. This book, published by O’Reilly and adorned with a Kudu engraving, probably does about as good a job as possible in introducing a new display framework that is intended to replace, well, everything from User to GDI to GDI+. And, it seems clear, to replace Flash as well.”

You go, Larry!

It goes without saying that MSDN Magazine doesn’t let the authors pick the titles (who can forget Don’s The Active Template Library Makes Building Compact COM Objects a Joy? : ), but what Ian and I had in mind here was 10 things that would surprise you when learning WPF and getting them in your face right up front. Enjoy.

You’ve probably seen this by now, but I thought I’d post the WinFX Nov05 CTP-related links together in a spot where I could find them later. In addition to being closer to what we plan on shipping, this CTP also works with VS05 RTM:

• WinFX Readme
• What’s New in WPF
• WinFX Runtime Components (WCF, WPF and WF)
• WinFX SDK
• VS05 Extensions for WCF and WPF
• VS05 Extensions for WF

Enjoy!

If I’ve got an Avalon Button, e.g.

<Button Content=“OK” />

Should I give the button a name so I can handle the event (I would never put the event handler directly in the XAML) like this:

<Button Content=“OK” x:Name=“okButton” />

Or, should I define a custom command and invoke it like this:

<Button Content=“OK” Command=“local:MyDialog.OkCommand” />

Defining a command seems like overkill (you do some stuff in the static ctor and some other stuff in the instance ctor), but I like consistency, e.g. my main window’s menu will use commands.

Thoughts on the best practice here?

Casey Chesnum has put together what is probably the first real WinFX app: a Media Center "light" app that looks damn cool. Check it out.

Is there something intrinsic about "workflow" that needs to be surfaced to folks or would any visual programming language do? I'm not finding any commercial products in my web searches, but I know that there have been some "integrated component"-style programming languages where you lay flow and logic out from a set of components on a toolbox. Is Windows Workflow Foundation one of those that MS just happens to be doing or is there something important about "workflow" that interests folks?