Latest CTP of WinFX: full of surpises

Preview WinFX

As part of the ongoing development of Win FX, Microsoft released a community technology preview (CTP) in January. This release has come with a lot of surprises, which include the preview of the next version of Visual Studio .NET code-named Orcas.

You might be surprised to see that a preview of the next version has come so early after the release of Visual Studio .NET 2005. (The current version is Visual Studio .NET 2005 and it was released in the month of November 2005.). But the fact is that Microsoft had been working on Win FX since the last few years and there was no GUI editor to develop Avalon applications except that with notepad and a MS-DOS compiler. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that Microsoft has integrated the Avalon programming interface with Visual Studio .NET 2005.

WinFX isn't a simple application as you might think but it is really a set of libraries targeted at the next generation of Windows Vista — formally code-named Windows Longhorn.

WinFX is built on the .NET Framework 2.0, and includes the three "foundation" products Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communications Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation. It is baked into Vista, but can be installed on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 via a download. If you had read my article on the next generation of Windows a few months back you will have covered Avalon and XAML (eXtended Application Markup Language) in brief.

Components of Win FX

WinFX SDK

— Every developer who has programmed with Windows for the last decade will be familiar with the Windows SDK. This is a massive library from Microsoft to develop applications for the Windows Platform and this includes the header files, libraries and help documentation. Keeping in mind the next generation of Windows now called Windows Vista as well as keeping in mind the backward compatibility of Windows — which Microsoft has always done in the past (maintain backward compatibility for most products), Microsoft has now decided to integrate the two libraries viz. Windows SDK and Win FX SDK. Henceforth all future releases of the Windows SDK include the WinFX SDK.

WinFX Runtime Components

— This is just the run time files (WinFX redistributables) needed for executing WinFX applications. Think of it as you would redistribute the .NET Framework Runtime files. For those of you who are not clear about this concept. Microsoft has released the .NET Framework in 2 separate editions. One is the entire .NET Framework SDK which contains all the libraries, compilers and documentations needed for developing .NET applications and the other is just the run time file which can be redistributed to customers who do not have the .NET Framework installed on their computers. The Win FX Runtime component is a fraction of the entire Win FX SDK.

Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" CTP WinFX Development Tools

— This tool provides developers the necessary support for building WinFX applications using the final released version of Visual Studio 2005. This support includes XAML Intellisense support through schema extensions for the editor, project templates for the Windows Presentation Foundation and the Windows Communication Foundation, and WinFX SDK documentation integration. Also a new component of this CTP is a preview of the Visual Designer for Windows Presentation Foundation (code name "Cider").

Do not miss the next part of this article to read about Expressions in WinFX, Windows Workflow Foundation, Microsoft Command Shell and Cider.