Is the long term goal of Cider to replace direct XAML editing? Or is XAML too rich to be fully expressed by Cider?

Steve

Hi Steve,

We don't pretend that we'll ever achieve designer coverage for the full fidelity and expressiveness of XAML, nor do we believe it's interesting to do so. We do, however, want to make sure that useful capabilities and constructs of WPF are exposed in the designer.

One of Cider's goals is to elminate the need to understand, edit, and troubleshoot XAML for certain scenarios. So for example, we'll have some basic things covered in the first release, e.g. control creation, layout, properties, styles and templates, etc.

We will expand the scenarios that are supported, and the additional breadth will come in two ways. First, Cider will cooperate with other tools, like the Expression Interactive Designer (Sparkle), to fill out additional scenarios and areas of specialization that are outside of what typical developers typically do.

Second, time will help -- future releases of the Cider designer and the VS toolset will address additional kinds of capabilities and scenarios. This part prolly goes without saying :-)

So again, we ultimately want to deliver a XAML-free experience for the things people really need to do with WPF. That said, we're going to be pragmatic about our delivery, and will strive to be tolerant of XAML that has been manually edited or pasted in from other sources.

Hope this helps...
chad

Chad,

Thank you for your response.

Will there be a release of Cider for VS 2005 running on XP and Vista in the Vista release time frame (second half 2006) or do we need to wait until "Orcas" is released in 2007?

Steve

The official ship vehicle for Cider will be VS Orcas. We will continue to release CTPs as we make progress

mark

Mark,

Thanks for the response.

Are you saying that when Vista ships this year, there will be no released Visual Studio support (we want to develop production code on released tools) for creating XAML applications? Since Orcas is scheduled for release after Vista, will there be a way to to develop WPF applications on XP and Vista with released tools between the time Vista and Orcas ship?

Steve

Yes that is exactly what I am saying. There will be a pre-release version of Cider available in that timeframe. What is your motivation for requiring a released version of the tool support?

mark

I work in a heavily regulated industry (Medical Devices) and our process requires it.

Will the XAML API be stable when Vista ships or will it be in a pre-release state? If the XAML generated by the Cider pre-release is production XAML, we may be able to use the pre-release tool. Or we can always drop back to manual XAML development.

Steve

My understanding is that XAML (& WinFX) will be stable and in production when Vista ships - WinFX RTMs with Vista. Thus the XAML (and WPF applications) will be release quality. It is just the tool (Cider) that will be a pre-release. Hope this helps

mark