It's been mentioned on several blogs already, but Microsoft, yesterday, announced another CTP (an acronym for Community Technical Preview, which is itself a fancy name for an unstable beta). The exciting thing about this one is that it's feature complete. From this point forward, all your WinFX code will work with only minimal changes in the final version. I had modeled some simple applications with earlier WinFX CTPs, but haven't tried to create more complex applications because the xaml format changed from CTP to CTP, and a couple times, it took me a while to figure out all of the breaking changes. No more. As I understand it, Microsoft has comitted to not make any significant breaking changes from this point forward.
I'm really excited about WinFX. It's going to allow us (developers, designers, product managers and the like) to build richer applications quicker. Here's an example of how we might be able to take advantage of its capabilities in Axure RP. One of the things we're really concerned about when desigining Axure RP is screen real estate for the wireframe designer. With the toolbars on the top; the sitemap, mastermap and widget library on the left; and the annotations and interactions on the right, space is at a premium. WPF gives us some new features that can help address this. One is that it supports partial transparency. An idea we had is that we could make the right sidebar partially transparent so you could see the wireframe through it. Then when you move over to the annotations or interactions to edit them, the sidebar could become opaque. Another feature is one that Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer (a long name for a product codenamed Sparkle -- get it: Flash, Sparkle) uses. Sparkle lets you zoom in to and out of the sidebar on the right. What this means is that rather than hiding the content of the sidebar when you make the width of the bar smaller, you can keep all of the content visible by scaling it. This could be a useful feature for the right bar in Axure RP too. Implementing this in WPF is as easy as setting a few properties. In Win32, it's nearly impossible. If you're interested, you can take a look at sceenshots of Sparkle here; the workspace zoom slider on the upper right is what lets you make the sidebar smaller or larger.
On top of all this, WPF lets you do this in the browser too! Anything you can do graphically with WPF in desktop applications, you can now do with browser applications. Fancy Excel-like grids: check, beautiful animations: check, scalable ui: check. But beware... to quote Uncle Ben (of Spiderman and not long-grain rice fame) "With great power comes great responsibility".
Lest I sound like a shill for the folks in Redmond, there are definitely a few caveats: First there's the WinFX Framework itself, an approximately 30MB download. This would increase the size of the Axure RP Installer from 25 megs to 55 megs. Unfortunately, as I understand, WinFX won't even be installed by default on Windows Vista (a whole other can of worms best left for another article). Also, if security isn't done properly, users (corporations, especially) might feel compelled to deactivate WinFX in the browser just like they do for ActiveX controls today. Fortunately on this front, security should be better than in Microsoft products past. Don Box (an architect for the WCF, the networking part of WinFX) said that only 19 of 1123 source code files had "unsafe" code. That means that less than 2% of the WCF code now has to be checked for (now famous) buffer overrun attacks that have become so commonplace. 2% is much easier to harden than 100%. I haven't seen any numbers about the safety of WPF code, though. Last but certainly not least, all of us have tons of code built in Win32 and HTML. Porting that won't be easy either. Axure RP Pro 4 supports nearly everything that Axure RP 2 did and we probably won't move to WinFX until we're sure that we will be able to continue to support it.
I should also add that WinFX obviously isn't the only rich application framework out there. There are a bunch of upcoming AJAX frameworks (indeed, more still to write about) and Mozilla and Safari are banding together to make an SVG-based application framework. If you take nothing else from this long-winded article, let it be this: for all of us building applications (yes: developers, designers, product managers and the like), exciting times lie ahead.
What do you think?
