2006-12-20
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( Page 5 of 6 )
The Right Tools for the Job
Most Microsoft tools that we use on XP for programming in .NET can be used with the new .NET 3.0 libraries. These tools include Visual Studio 2005 and the various Visual Studio Express products.
Microsoft has supplied several additional add-ons to Visual Studio to allow for .NET 3.0 programming. However, the add-on for Workflow Foundation is not compatible with the Express products; you need Visual Studio 2005 for that.
In order to program .NET 3.0 with Visual Studio or the Express products, you need the .NET 3.0 SDK. You can find it here. (Watch that page, though; as Microsoft updates the SDK you'll want to check the links on the page for newer versions. The same holds for the following links I'm giving you.) Next, you'll need the Extensions for Visual Studio, found here. These extensions are for WCF and WPF.
If you want to do WF development (remember, you can't use the Express products), you can get the Visual Studio extensions here.
If you're looking for third-party products, Mobiform is a company in Florida known for being active in the .NET community, and they have created a WPF tool called Aura.
Express Yourself
Besides the Visual Studio add-ins, Microsoft is in the process of releasing a whole new suite of products for web development called Microsoft Expression Studio. The full studio includes four distinct products:
- Expression Web: A tool for building web sites, including strong support for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). works by itself or alongside Visual Studio for ASP.NET development. (One interesting aspect about this tool is you can make use of ASP.NET controls without actually being an ASP.NET programmer.)
- Expression Blend: (Shown in this figure.) A drag-and drop XAML tool for creating sophisticated ("stunning" says Microsoft) GUIs.
- Expression Design: A professional-strength illustration and graphic design tool.
- Expression Media: A digital asset-management tool
These products are available individually or as a suite. Presently most of these products are still in beta and available for trial downloads. (Check the official site often for more information on availability.)
For developing in .NET 3.0, the primary tool here of interest is the Blend tool. This tool lets you drag and drop XAML pages. It's an entire development environment that lets you create XAML projects and it includes support for creating 2D, 3D, and animated GUIs that can incorporate both vector drawings, bitmap drawings, video, and high quality text. I encourage you to check it out. The other three tools might be of interest to you (I know I'll use them), but they don't pertain directly to .NET 3.0 or Vista development.
Finally, if you just want to try XAML and you don't want to use the Expression products, you can use a simple Microsoft tool called XAMLpad, as shown here.
But if you insist on Win32...
But what if you insist on doing Win32 programming in C++, without using the .NET framework? I said I'd focus on the .NET aspect, but here are a couple tidbits about the updates to Win32 under Vista:
- Updates to the concurrency programming system: Check out this blog http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,17433c64-f45e-40f7-8772-dedb69ab2190.aspx from one of the gurus.
- Application restart: Using these APIs, you can inform the operating system that in the event your program crashes, it should be restarted. Also, if your application crashes, the operating system will call into a function that you supply, whereby you can save some recovery data.
- Application logging through the Common Log File System: (This feature was available in Windows Server 2003, but not XP. It is now available in Vista.)
- Transactional NTFS, or TxF: NTFS now supports transactions where, should an error occur in the middle of writing a file or set of files, you can roll back to the previous versions of the files without leaving them in a midway, corrupted state.
- New common controls: The new common controls include an interesting type of dialog box called a task dialog that allows more user options than the standard message boxes. (Check out this page http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511299.aspx on MSDN for some cool examples.) There are also some changes to the usual common controls. For example, list views now have a tiling feature. You can see some samples here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511292.aspx.
There are more enhancements to Win32. This page on MSDN lists them for you.
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