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Blend Release Candidate is out!

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 Blend box cover

The RC has landed.

Get it here...

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2007
    I'm extremely disappointed in Microsoft for providing an acceptable tool (Blend) for designers and spending absolutely no time on suitable development tools for WPF for actual developers (cider is unusable, and after playing with Orcas it has an equally rubbish designer with the exact same buggyness, appalling usability and awful slowness). I have had clients ask me to build WPF applications for Vista and already had to answer "Sorry, I don't have any suitable development tools yet so development will take 70% longer and cost you more, but if you want to build for Winforms 2...".  On the other hand I had two shipping products on the day of release of .NET 2.0 thanks to the CTP's, golive license and the tools working. Put blend in MSDN or give developers an alternative sooner rather than later.  Please - WPF will be dead in the water before it gets started if things continue at this rate. It's the lowest takeup I've ever seen of a presentation framework two months after consumer availability and 5+ months after developer availability.  By now you should be seeing a lot more than just MS sponsored tech demos.

  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2007
    I would have to concur with Simon.  There's nothing wrong with the WPF as a technology --- and perhaps its feature set will inspire developers beyond Outlook knock-offs.  But it will die on the vine if developers don't have to tools to deliver.

  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2007
    I agree with you both. The WPF coming out party is over, give us the tools, guidance and frameworks.

  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2007
    I can't disagree that the tools are immature at this point.  It might not be fair to compare WPF 1.0 with WinForms 2.0, but even compared with WinForms 1.0, the WPF dev tools are behind.  My co-worker installed the March Orcas CTP and found that it aggressively leaks GDI handles, requiring frequent reboots of the VPC image he installed it in.  So the cost-plus tool (Expression) is close to production, but the tool that we MSDN subscribers pay for whether it gets delivered or not (Visual Studio) is, what, a year out?  That's disappointing.