Karsten let us in on one of apparently only a few API changes in WPF Beta 2: the ZIndex attached property for Panels. A lot of people have been clammoring for this feature since day one. It used to be that the order of the child elements inside of the Children collection dictacted the ZIndexing, so if you wanted to raise one element in front of another you had to manipulate the collection which kind of sucked because that requires code-behind logic as opposed to just being able to use a property setter in a trigger. Well, not anymore. ;)

Update 10PM:

Originally I thought only Canvas supported this new property, but thanks to this post from Tim Sneath I found out it's applicable to all Panel types that support layering. Tim also mentions changes to Slider and Scrollbar, further refinement of XAML syntax and changes to WinForms integration components.

Wow, it's a heck of a day for product releases. Now there's a new May CTP of Expression Interactive Designer available for download. Designers of the world rejoice! ;P

In addition to Vista Beta 2 being made available for download today, Office 2007 Beta 2 is also available for download now. Knowledge workers of the world rejoice! ;)

Hate to do "me too" style posts, but, just in case you didn't read it someplace else yet, Vista Beta 2 is now available for download. If you have an MSDN Subscription, you can also download it there. Windows geeks throughout the world rejoice!

I just hope this build comes with drivers for my laptop's SATA hard drive controller...

Note: This also seems to include an updated set of WinFX components, not sure what's diff. between the last release and this one yet.

Update 11:54PM:

Bah, still no drivers for my SATA controller. This sucks, I have yet to be able to experience Vista in it's full glory because I can only run it in VirtualPC instances.

Hmmm, this is certainly interesting. Not sure how I feel about it honestly. On one hand I think it's kinda cool and innovative, but another part of me wonders if it's the right approach to solving the problem. Keep in mind that JavaScript 2.0 is basically aligning itself with Microsoft's JScript.NET implementation (note: MS worked closely with ECMA on the innovations to ensure they wouldn't be left behind) where you have strong typing and better support for OOP principles (if that's what floats your boat).

So, honestly I'm not sure this is worth the investment. IMHO, time would be better spent focusing on providing a better IDE experience for the JavaScript language itself and making sure that JScript.NET aligns itself with all new standards (E4X, 2.0, etc.).

A couple weeks ago I was wondering where the heck it was and now the first CTP has been released. Downloaded and played with it a little bit and, so far, I love it. Definitely the best environment Microsoft has come up with thus far to do HTML+CSS design.

Please bear with me while I upgrade from .Text 0.95 to SubText 1.0. Everything should just be working, but it's not quite as pretty as it was right now because I haven't finished working on the skin. Then again, most people are probably reading all my content from an RSS reader anyway.

My main motivation for upgrading is that .Text codebase is basically dead. SubText picked up from that codebase and made some improvements and is alive in terms of a community. One of the main features I'm taking advantage of is the comment spam blocking features that have been added (i.e. not allowing certain words, no comments on posts older than N days, etc.). Hopefully they'll be some sort of captcha implementation soon too, because I'm getting sick of pruning the spam out of my feedback. Another freebie that comes with the conversion is that I now have an Atom feed. If you prefer Atom to RSS for some reason, have at it!

Well, for starters WPF/E stands for Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere. What's that? Well, check out this Channel9 video to find out!

Wow, check this MSDN article out. The future sure looks bright for ADO.NET. Coupled with the recent innovations in client databinding technologies (ASP.NET 2.0, WinForms 2.0), forthcoming LINQ innovations and forthcoming client databinding innovations in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).  Microsoft sure seems set to take data access, manipulation and presentation to the next level.

The only question I have is, what is the WinFS team doing while all these other technologies are emerging around it? I hope they align themselves properly, because it would be a shame for WinFS to come out and not provide a programming model consistent with these new advances.

Update 5/13:

Looks like they pulled the ADO.NET article off MSDN for some reason. I'm not the only person wondering where it went though.

A May CTP of LINQ was dropped a couple of days ago. One of the coolest new features is without a doubt IQueryable<T>. Check out this explanation of it here on Matt Warren's weblog. Also very cool is the ability to dynamically compose and then compile lambda expressions into IL. Oh and definitely check out this post from Eric White to familiarize yourself with the nomenclature used when talking about LINQ.

I can't wait to start LINQifying™ our O/R mapping layer in my spare time. Unfortunately, I seem to spend too much time theses days providing valuable features to the company's customers to be able to play with all the fun new technology out there. What has this world come to!? :)

Microsoft's mea cupla for screwing up the web project model with the Web Site Project type has been released. We've been using it here at Mimeo ever since we started our 2.0/2005 migration and had great success wth it even in the beta stages.

The differences between RC1 and Release are surprisingly big, but I guess they did enough internal testing to feel it was solid enough and pushed it out the door. Read all about it on Scott Guthrie's blog and/or download it from here. Big thanks to the team that worked on getting this out there!

Oh and make sure to check out Web Deployment Projects too! It works for both project Web Site projects as well as Web Application projects.

I just whipped up an implementation of an expression for ASP.NET 2.0 that will do String::Format on top of a string fetched from resource file. You can read about and download it from here.

Here's another video about WPF on Channel9, this time with Greg Schechter who is an Architect on the WPF team. No fancy demos here, just really good, low level geek talk (my favorite!) about what sits under the WPF's hood that makes it possible for designers/developers to provide great experiences to their end users. Lots of talk about exactly what parts are managed vs. unmanaged code. Highly recommended viewing material for all the WPF geeks out there.

Here's a great MSDN TV episode demoing some of the 3D capabilities in WPF. One of the greatest things about WPF, from the developer's perspective, is that the programming model is consistent whether you're working in 2D or 3D. From the designers perspective, the ability to seamlessly integrate 3D content with 3D content is priceless.

Quartz. You remember... that web development environment Microsoft demo'd at PDC '05? Well, where the heck is it? It was the most immediately useful application out of the entire “Expression” suite of products and while there have been betas for Acrylic and even Sparkle, there has never been one for Quartz. What gives? Curious web developer minds want to know! ;)

Here's a Channel9 interview with the IE7 team members responsible for fixing/upgrading IE's CSS support in this latest version. I don't care about new IE shell features as much as I do upgrades to the MSHTML rendering engine. IMO they've done a kick ass job, but I still have a hard time forgiving them for taking so long to come around to finally upgrade the thing. :\