Jumping to Orcas and WPF
After releasing the first version of my product, I would most likely jump directly to using Orcas and WPF targeting 3.0, at which point I will begin blogging about my experiences and the new feature set. I firmly believe in moving to the latest released languages and technologies as soon as possible. I don’t want to invest in moribund technologies, and I do want the most productive tools as I have limited resources.
I wonder how practical it is for me to move to the Orcas beta right now. There will be probably be a number of problems that I encounter, but will it be more than made up by the expanded feature set of Visual Studio or will there be show-stoppers? Is compiler and IDE performance going to take a hit as it did in Whidbey? Both productivity tools, Resharper 3.0 and Refactor Pro/CodeRush, already support Orcas.
For now, I will play it safe and jump into Orcas after I released NStatic. Every change seems to drag my release ever farther away.
As for WPF, I halted my user interface development work in anticipation for WPF, since it would obsolete some of my existing work and also includes support for animations, 3D, and a declarative programming model. My 3D effects library that I spent some time developing, including perspective warping for images, will probably go to waste.
My plan is to switch over to WPF as the primary programming model and utilize its WinForms compatibility controls. I will purchase the WPF editions of the existing control library as there are already many WPF-based user interface components available now. I purchased Chris Sells and Chris Anderson’s books on WPF; I will probably also buy Adam Nathan’s based on Jeff Atwood’s recommendation. The WPF programming model is just so clean and beautiful, a sharp contrast from MFC.
Feel free to move your development environment as you see fit, but us (potential) users need stability. Please consider:
1. Don't switch to Orcas until it's released. I'd prefer not to have an additional CLR to deal, but especially not one that's not of production quality.
2. Please be sure that you're backwards compatible. That is, I need to be able to analyze my .Net 2 code regardless of your environment.
Posted by: CWuestefeld | June 22, 2007 at 11:55 AM
Orcas allows multi-targeting, so you can still deploy to 2.0/3.0 even if your solutions and projects are in Orcas.
But, please, release nStatic first -- I've been waiting to buy it for so long now!
The danger of touching Orcas/3.: If you use C# 3, it'll be hard to go back to C# 2 -- even if just for the lambda syntax.
I've been using Orcas Beta 1 and it's quite stable though; I haven't noticed any major perf hits apart from the Workflow designer.
Posted by: Michael | June 25, 2007 at 11:34 PM
Hey, I recently added a news widget from www.widgetmate.com to my blog. It shows the latest news, and just took a copy and paste to implement. Might interest you too.
Posted by: Mark Vane | June 26, 2007 at 06:53 AM
Had me worried there for a second -- I read the title and thought, "oh no! NStatic will be delayed even more!"
I'm really, really looking forward to trying out NStatic, and I'm glad to hear it won't be delayed due to a WPF port.
Posted by: Judah | July 01, 2007 at 03:38 PM