David Findley's Blog

My little home in the cloud.

November 2003 - Posts

A Visual Editor for MSBuild

I found this while surfing around the net for Avalon stuff.

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=2cb20e79-d706-4706-9ea0-26188257ee7d

Bare Bones Avalon Hello World App

Here's the most basic Avalon app I could make:

using System;
using MSAvalon.Windows;
public class MyApp : Application
{
    private Window win;
    protected override void OnStartingUp(StartingUpCancelEventArgs e)
    {
        win =
new Window();
        win.Text = "Hello World!";
        win.Show();
    }

    [STAThread]
    public static void Main()
    {
        MyApp app =
new MyApp();
        app.Run();
    }
}

use this command line to build:

csc /t:winexe /r:WindowsBase.dll,PresentationCore.dll,PresentationFramework.dll Hello.cs

Alternatively you can slap the following into a .proj file and use MSBuild to compile the app:

<Project DefaultTargets="Build">
    <PropertyGroup>
        <Property Language="C#" />
        <Property TargetName="Hello" />
    </PropertyGroup>

    <Import Project="$(LAPI)\WindowsApplication.target" />

    <ItemGroup>
        <Item Type="Compile" Include="*.cs" />
    </ItemGroup>
</Project>

Back on track.

It's been a long summer. My day job has kept me away from blogging.

I got a chance to go to PDC this year. There was so much to absorb. I'm still letting everything percolate. Here's the things that impressed me:

VS.NET Whidbey

  • Intellisense is greatly improved.
  • Extensible debugger displays was VERY cool.
  • Code visualization (C#). Say goodbye to Visio. I think I might actually be able to use the code diagram now.
  • Of course the C# language improvements are great (Generics, Iterators anonymous functions etc.)

Longhorn

  • Avalon - I love the direction that the presentation layer is going. XAML was REALLY cool. I really like the idea of applying the declarative nature of XML to UI layout and design.
  • WinFS - I need to study this more. I'm not totally sold on it yet.

Indigo

  • I liked what I saw of Indigo. This is def the right direction to bring web services and SOA into the mainstream.
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