Matias Woloski’s Blog

It's been a while as Kent said in his post. We've packaged lots of work done in the past 6 months or so. Mariano and Sebastian from the Southworks team have been actively commiting code.

Read the features in the home page of our codeplex site and download the release if you want to see some cool reference implementations and WPF CAB on esteroids.

I’ve arrived to China after a long journey (~35 hours). I still needs to figure out what’s the time and what should I eat. Shanghai is very nice and it looks like any occidental city plenty of people and lights.

This week I will present in Chengdu about Software Factories and next week will deliver a 2 day workshop. And of course I will go to the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and squeeze every minute I’m here.

The good old Updater Application Block won't be updated by patterns & practices, and the community now owns it. Our team at Smart Client Contrib took ownership of it. We (Curtis Gray mainly) ported it to work on .net 2.0 and Windows Vista. Below is the change log:

Application Block source code

• Works in Windows Vista!
• Updater Application Block relies on Enterprise Library 2.0 (Jan 2006) for the configuration
  • Enterprise Library 3.0 could be used by recompiling the block and changing the configuration files
• BITS downloader no longer requires Administrator access.
• InstallUtil processor scans the .NET framework redist folders for a specified version of the InstallUtil application. It is no longer necessary to have .NET 1.1 installed.
• Multiple downloaders are correctly enumerated.
• Various changes and bug fixes to correctly parse Updater configuration files for each activation processor.
• Added saving of Source Folder in Manifest Editor
• The code compiles on .Net 2.0
• Quickstarts migrated to support the new configuration system
• Breaking changes only related to configuration and not the Updater API
• Bits Downloader now handles broken downloads gracefully
• UpdaterTask serialization fixed. There was a bug on the net 1.1 version of UAB related to the partial update scenario. When some files were removed from the manifest, the UAB serializes the UpdaterTask with the original version of the files. This caused the ApplicationDeployProcessor to fail.
• Partial update scenario fixed. The algorithms that might be used to calculate file hashes are non-keyed hash algorithms like: MD5; RIPEMD160; SHA1; SHA256; SHA384; SHA512
• Manifest tool fixed to correctly support salt enabled hashes

Samples

• Bootstrapper sample: a small exe app that will be installed in the client and will manage the updates
• MSI: showcase how to use MSIs to install, patch or remove an application
• Automatic Update: the application managing the updates automatically
• Manual Update: the user might decide to update or not the application

On the Smart Client side, we have some new features, samples and bugs fixed:

New Features:

• ItemsControlChildUIAdapter : allows any child of an ItemsControl to be utilized as a UI extension site (for example, allows a Separator to be used as an extension site)
• FrameworkContentElementActivationService : ensures any WPF FrameworkContentElements are built up correctly and exhibit the same behavior as FrameworkElements
• WrappedCabCommand : a WPF ICommand that wraps a CAB Command

Samples:

• Shell samples:
  • ApplicationShellApplication
  • WindowShellApplication
• Workspace samples:
  • WindowsWorkspace
  • DeckWorkspace
  • TabWorkspace
  • ZoneWorkspace
• Miscellaneous samples:
  • UI Adapters and Commands
• Custom Visualizer

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug in FrameworkElementActivationService that was assuming the OriginalSource of a focus event was a FrameworkElement
• Ensuring WindowSmartPartInfo only applies values to dependency properties if explicitly set

Go to our Codeplex site and start using them!

Thanks to everyone who attended the briefing. It was really cool to see so many people interested in what we were talking. These are Beto and myself on stage during my presentation about user experience with WPF (look at the cool snowboard in 3D:)…

Thanks to Paulo and Ezequiel who wrote this piece of code. Paulo is an expert on XAML art and Ezequiel simply grabbed the XAML, open it in Visual Studio and added offline support within a couple of hours. Thanks!

As I said during the presentation here is the code and the ppt…

When: September 20th, 2007
Where: Paseo La Plaza, Buenos Aires, Argentina

I’ll be presenting about "user experience" and what could be achieved using WPF in a scenario where offline is required. This is a preview…

Register here!

The p&p client team is working hard on getting hands on labs for both Smart Client Software Factory/CAB and Web Client Software Factory out of the door. I've been following the work they've been doing and I must say that the labs are the most insightful labs I ever seen.

Mariano was heavily involved in the creation of the labs and he really knows the technology, so the quality of the labs is pretty good. Now he's asking for feedback on the Smart Client labs since a final release of them is coming that will show how to use the Disconnected Service Agent and the WPF support. He also announced that the labs for Web Client Software Factory are available to download.