June 2006 - Posts
I kind of liked the sound of WinFX, but Soma decided to rename it back to .NET Framework 3.0. I guess this makes sense since it keeps everything in line with the previous product branding. There are no actual changes to what is included. It still will ship with Vista and will include the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF/Avalon) and the Windows Communication Framework (WCF/Indigo).
WinFX refactored to .NET Framework 3.0
Microsoft announced yet another team edition of Visual Studio 2005. This latest one is titled Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals. It does look like it has some cool features like the ability to compare things in source control with what is in production and automated database testing. For the most part it is a bunch of stuff you don't care about unless you are a dba.
I didn't see anything about if it would be included in Team Suite, but I doubt it will.
Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals
Expression Web Designer has been out for a while and I am just not getting a change to play with it. So far I am pretty impressed. Upon opening it recognized all of the web sites I had opened previously in Visual Studio 2005. I was able to open them and it gave me a true WSIWYG type interface for pages built with XHTML and CSS. On top of that it recognizes all of your ASP.NET 2.0 controls such as GridViews, MultiViews and displays them accordingly. One cool thing it does is allow you to view a page in Design View and HTML View at the same time.
So far my only complaints are that it didn't recognize the use of the ~ specified in paths to my CSS files and it doesn't appear to support SourceSafe integration. That aside it looks like a great tool to do your XHTML editing with. It also doesn't support reading Global Resources (although it does recognize that the expression is there).
Go download it now.
Expression Web Designer