"I Love It When A Plan Comes Together!"

I just had to quote George Peppard’s cigar-chomping-glove-wearing character Col. Hannibal Smith from TVs “The A Team” because it seems so appropriate. One of the beautiful things about the software industry is the ecosystem that develops around it and the cycle of information flow between software companies and their customers. So it is really exciting to see a situation where our customers provide important feedback to us and we are able to act on that feedback to better address a customer need.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you have heard me discuss our plans for shipping Crossbow in the “Orcas” product (the next release of Visual Studio). Many of our customers were quick to respond to that information by letting us know that we needed to do whatever we could to ship Crossbow with WPF. This makes sense of course since many customers are planning on delivering a WPF version of their application shortly after WPF ships and for some customers the control set of WPF lacks some key controls that Windows Forms has (like the DataGridView) and they need to rely on Crossbow in order to ship.

Well, I’m happy to say you spoke and we listened! We have spent the last several months working very hard on developing and executing on a plan where we could deliver the Crossbow runtime as an integral part of WPF. As of the Beta2 release of WPF, the Crossbow runtime will be part of the WPF redist and reside in the GAC just like all of the other WPF components. And from that point forward we will be on the WPF ship schedule which means that we will RTM with WPF.

Thank you for your valuable feedback.

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 01, 2006
  This will be of interest to those of you with an investment in Windows Forms. Originally, Microsoft had...
• Anonymous
  March 02, 2006
  The comment has been removed