Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

Well I can scarcely believe it myself. If you had asked me a few years ago if I could imagine using FireFox as my preferred debugging environment in .NET then I would have laughed hard, but yes folks it’s true. IE 7.0 is driving me insane with how slow it is whilst debugging. Let me take you through a course of events that led me to writing this post.

It all began with me developing a company intranet application using WPF XBAP technology and several views (I am using MVC) into it I decided to update my source control to tortoise 1.5.0 and grab the newest version of Ankh as it was meant to work nicely in Vista. So, no problems with the installs and just as I open up VS.NET 2008 I discover that the Ankh install has caused VS to loose its project history and my profile settings as well and it begins to set up as though for the first time.

Now I am a patient guy, so I just quickly get things back to the way they were and fire up my XBAP ready to start work again. I create another view port for my application and decide that I would like to run the application to see this new view…..oh oh, default settings have gone back to IE 7.0 and it’s a tad slower than FireFox in loading the application and just as slow in releasing the IE  process and stopping the debugger too. I wondered if the trick to getting the XBAP back to loading by default in FireFox was the same as it is for ASP.Net? A quick look for the context menu option on the XAML files does not show up with a ‘browse with’ so I decided to open an ASP.Net application and reset the default browser from there, then switch back to the XBAP and hey presto - the problem is solved. See below for the visuals:

Go to an ASPX page and right click to get the context menu and select ‘Browse With’, then select FireFox as the default browser….reopen my WPF application and my XBAP now loads in FireFox by default and I’m all done!

I equally enjoy developing for the desktop as much as I do distributed messaging  but simply ripping open a new Windows Forms project these days has an overt sense of flouting the inevitable. Whilst it is clear that WCF was clearly the front runner of the technology stacks to be adopted from the 3.0 platform (mea culpa) many of us felt that WCF offered the most bang for buck in terms of early adoption, I cant help but think that my WinForm days are nearing an end and the sooner I get on board and bring WPF into my toolbox the better.

So I will start here and now and make a point of posting my progress and observations on the road to WPF enlightenment. I have begun this quest choosing an XBAP application that will indeed be available to download on my companies web site in the not too distant future. The application in question will be a Point Case Estimation tool that automatically pops out estimates based on uploaded XMI formatted UML diagrams and user declared values for all the technical and environmental factors that are pertinent to a given project. I will be enlisting the services of one of my colleagues (an application designer) to assist with using expression blend in making the application more visually appealing (as you can see from below it’s warranted - the image is my design) and it should serve as a useful foray into the brave new world of developer / designer partnership.