I hope you’ve all had a nice holiday season (or you’re still at it). One more day of peace for me and then it’s back to work - we have the XPO 2 beta out to subscribers (initial migration instructions here) and I’m going to post a lot more informational stuff about that, plus there’s another product in the pipeline… lots to do, as always :-) I hope I’ll find the time to do a bit more blog posting than I have done the past weeks, but I guess we’ll see how it goes. …

I’m sure there was nothing they could possibly have done to prevent that.

Cider (MSDN TV demo here) is the visual designer for the Windows Presentation Foundation (used to be Avalon), part of WinFX, and it was just released for the first time as part of the WinFX December 2005 CTP. It works just fine in VS 2005 RTM, which is how I tried it. My impressions are:

• It has a lot of bugs. They are everywhere, but that’s to be expected.
• It can nevertheless do some serious work for you if you want to create XAML — certainly much faster than writing the XML yourself.
• I …

In case you haven’t heard, WinFS is the new relational file system for Windows. Read the blurb on the official page, I’m not going to repeat that here. Now, is that a good thing? Reading the SDK docs for the current beta 1 refresh, one might think the authors are mainly promoting the use of more relational database technology (and spreading false information such as that the SQL keyword used to select relationally linked data is UNION), but obviously WinFS is a lot more than that, with its soph …

GAT (the Guidance Automation Toolkit) is an interesting package that allows you to easily create VS extensions, wizards, template engines and similar things, without going through all the hassle that the Visual Studio SDK (used to be VSIP) still involves. The new Dec 2005 CTP runs on VS 2005 RTM, which makes the whole thing much more useful. They have also updated the templating engine, so it’s now the same as in the current DSL tools CTP. …

For you Germans among my readers, it might be interesting to know that the last and the current edition of the dot.net magazin have articles written by me — a workshop article about the rubberband project in the 12/05 edition and a test of Developer Express XtraPivotGrid in the 01/02/06 edition. There’s also something upcoming about Developer Express Refactor!, but I’m not sure in which issue it will appear. …

Get it here, read about the new features here and tell them about what you don’t like here.

Weird title, cool thing. Just a quick pointer to a toolkit that had so far escaped my attention: the Guidance Automation Toolkit and Extensions In a nutshell, it allows you create wizards for VS very easily, that can perform complex tasks related to code generation. Input can be queried from the user, selections can be made from existing project items or XML files, and all this information can be used in the process of code generation. This can happen when new projects are created, or context s …