New version of WPF Released

Today, Microsoft has released a beta preview for of SP1 for various editions of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework 3.5. And Tim Sneath has also blogged about the availability of the new major version of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), that will ship with the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1, which full version will be available later this summer.

The downloads for these Service Pack beta releases are available here. For more information also check out Scott Guthrie’s blog post here.

There are a few major improvements, and the most notable one is the introduction of the Client Profile, which is a scaled down version of the .NET Framework 3.5, that is around 25 MB, where assemblies that aren’t used are removed. Its pretty amazing that the solution to the deployment issue for enterprise WPF applications is pretty similar to the approach adopted by the Silverlight runtime. Ease of deployment will definitely help in increasing the adoption rate of WPF in the industry.

There is also improvement to the WPF graphics engine, with enhanced support for shaders and deeper DirectX support, enabling a Direct3D surface to be brushed on top of any surface of WPF elements. Another notable improvement is the “fixes” on the BitmapEffects we most commonly use, Drop Shadow and Blur, which are now hardware-accelerated, and was previously a definite “no-no” in developing WPF applications as it takes up too much processing power.

Other than that, there are many other improvements like the loading screen of XBAPs now running in HTML instead which is definitely a great improvement, the introduction of Splash screen support in Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

There will also be new controls to add on to the arsenal of controls available in WPF, which are the DataGrid, Office Ribbon, and most notably, the WebBrowser control, which could potentially enable seamless integration of WPF and Silverlight applications.

Its great to see that many improvements on WPF, and if Silverlight is to continue evolving to provide the capabilities of what WPF has today, I must say, the future looks very promising indeed.

Popfly Game Creator

A few days back, Techcrunch reported on a new feature on the social-mashup-gadget-builder Web site, Popfly, which allows users to create their own mini games.

It’s a pretty neat addition on to Popfly, as in the first place, games were never really this easy to create, and this would really be a great addition onto the list of stuff (mashups, gadgets (or widgets), and Web pages) that non-technical people can build, just with a few clicks.

I tried some of the templates out, and I must say its really simple to create these games, and you could straight away play any of the templates to get a feel of how the games are, and then customize the background, characters etc to your liking, and of course, share it with your friends.

It is built using Silverlight 1.0, but even so, I believe it only exhibits a fraction of what Silverlight 2.0 could be capable of, as there is a big difference between the capabilities of managed code and scripting languages.

The game creator function is currently still in Alpha, and I’m speculating that it would only be officially RTM’ed only when it is built on Silverlight 2.0, not the Beta 1 version, but the RTW version of Silverlight 2.0.

As for the targeted audience for this feature…I dunno, maybe young children or girls that like mini-games?

Invited to join Microsoft Popfly!

I’ve just been invited to join the testing of Popfly! By dear Suzanne from the Popfly team, thank you so much Suzanne! (Though I dunno who you really are J)

(Say Hi to Suzanne)

Soooo, just what is Popfly, the name sounds abit funky…hmm, picture something, “Pop”’ing out of nowhere, “fly”ing around…Lookie here! Its a bird, Its a plane, NO! Its Superman? NO AGAIN, Its Popfly!

(Taken from the official Microsoft Popfly site)

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(Sidenote: Do you like ducks? Ducks are cute, and just way too cool, but definitely not related to Popfly…or are they? And its not ducks we’re talking about here, well, its rubber duckies! ON top of that,  seeing them stand nicely in a row, neat huh!)

(Taken from the official Microsoft Popfly site)

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Well, talking about Popfly,  it’s basically a website by Microsoft, released around last month (May 2007), that is built on Microsoft Silverlight, that allows users, including those who don’t know programming, to create web pages and mashups, even without dealing with a single line of code (though there is still the need to do some coding when it comes to creating certain blocks, mashups, etc though), this means, even those that do not know programming could make websites, mashups, and share their stuff online!