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Nick on WPF/E

  • Artigo

Now that we've shipped our first CTP, I can tell you what I've been working on for the last six months. (No points for guessing!) It's been a lot of work but I'm pretty happy with the ctp. It's definitely not perfect, and there's a some important scenarios we don't solve yet -- while it might be technically possible to write a large data entry forms application on WPF/E, I wouldn't want to be the one to do it, not until we have more controls. But it is a snappy little platform, and I'm constantly amazed how far I can get using just WPF/E and a little JavaScript.

As always, I'd love your feedback. I'm especially interested in feedback on controls and other UI framework functionality -- I'd love to know what kind of apps you'd like to build, what technologies you want to build them with (which controls, what programming languages, what server infrastructure, ...), and what browsers/os'es you'd like to run them on. I'd also love feedback on the input/mouse/keyboard APIs (and yes, we don't have keyboard events yet, we're working on it) -- I've worked on input long enough to have a pretty good idea of what people need, but no matter how much you know there's always a customer requirement you haven't heard yet. So don't hesitate to post a comment or send mail (nkramer at Microsoft), I look forward to hearing from you!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2006
    Hi Nick, The controls I'd really like to see in WPF/E are: ListBox (with ControlTemplate), GridView, TreeView, Menu, DockPanel, StackPanel. Programming language: C# And also available on Linux. Thanks for your job!

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2006
    A GridView-like control, C# and access to webservices... that would make WPF/E a complete killer for data entry forms (at least for what we are doing). I have a lot of customers that don't care at all for flashy graphics, but are willing to pay lots of money for rich GUIs for data entry in the browser. We're currently experimenting with AJAX, but we'd definitely prefer writing client-side code in C#.

  • Anonymous
    December 09, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 14, 2006
    It will be great if WPF/E will support copyable and read only text areas. So, what user will able to copy text from copyable areas and disallow to copy any text from read only areas.

  • Anonymous
    December 14, 2006
    I’m in the business of developing business oriented web ui, and while I’m really impressed with the simplicity of the XAML/JavaScript model and the wider platform support, the flashy nature of the current controls is keeping me in suspense. The basic data entry controls are a must – anything less than the ones html offers would leave me really baffled. A RichTextBox that a savvy JavaScript-developer could turn into a browser based color coded code editor (that works) would be real nice. Events and caret stuff are important. Being able to bind form elements to counterparts on the html page (or some other way of easily injecting / extracting data) could minimize tedious work. With regards to language support C# would make the back-end guys happy (since few of us are any good at JavaScript), but JavaScript is imho the perfect choice for a clean model. With regards to platform support it would be nice if the “E” in WPF/E were true – there is at least one OS which is visibly missing, and not supporting it could fuel a resistance against this technology. It would be nice if we could “just use this” without having to engage in the usual debates. Are you doing anything active to make this technology “public domain”? MS recently pulled the IE DHTML Editing Control from Vista and soon XP will follow, which leave a lot of us scared in the dust. Fool me once…

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2006
    One more: ability to attach custom fonts. So designer will able to use any font type he/she want. I think it should be fonts cache to reduce data transfer.

  • Anonymous
    January 02, 2007
    We are making an application that is strickly WPF, but are running into problems where certain clients are using windows 2000, or other unsupported OS for .NET 3.0.   We are hoping to utilize WFP/E as a backward-compatibility aspect of our new application.  This allows us to more easily move forward to WPF while still supporting our slower-moving clients. Basic form controls in WPF/E would immediately enable this approach.  Otherwise we are forced to engineer our own XAML parser that will take our WPF source and render as webpage.

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2007
    While waiting for WPF/E controls you can set the WPF/E control to windowless and place HTML-controls on top, works well. What I miss in the CTP are more event types like click, mouseright, mousewheel. While experimenting with the mousemove event I couldn't figure out howto convert between document coordinates and canvas coordinates ?

  • Anonymous
    February 05, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2007
    The comment has been removed