Today Microsoft has published the release candidate of Avalon and Indigo Beta 1. The most interesting features of this release over the CTP releases of the past is that these bits work on Visual Studio 2005 beta 2, both full and express. Enjoy!
I remember a day when SDRs were deep, secret mojo that even folks that knew about them were special, let along actually attending them. Now, we’re posting them on the internet. I love my company.
Here. This application demonstrates the two things I’m finding that Avalon has changed about my thinking. The first is that data binding makes itself into even trivial Avalon applications and its presence is appreciated. The second is that I want to push as much stuff into XAML as I can. Keeping the data separate from the code makes a bunch of sense and, for my trivial application, keeping the data inline with the rest of the UI was very useful. It allows for easy maintenance and localization while pushing as much of my application into declarations and out of imperative statements. The more I can tell the computer what I want instead of how I want to accomplish it, the better off I am.
What with the public availability of the Avalon and Indigo CTPs and our stated goal of pre-beta bit releases to gather feedback, you might wonder, "But where should this feedback go?" I'll tell you where to go -- the MSDN Product Feedback Center, which now has entries for Avalon and Indigo. Hog pile on the WinFX API product teams!
