The last few weeks I’ve felt like a little intern again. With the WPF Bootcamp and the early stages WCF integration into the Speedy Rewards messaging infrastructure (I’ll be posting on this soon), I’ve had lots of time to play with .Net 3.0 stuff.
For those that have had a chance to fiddle, there are two feasible options at this point: 1) VS.Net Extensions for WCF & WPF and 2) Orcas CTP’s. The Extensions, in my opinion, were a valiant stop-gap effort to get people started. This is especially true for WCF, because there isn’t a whole lot of design time experience necessary for web services with the exception of those monstrous config sections. The WPF extensions were OK, but it was basically like having XAMLPad embedded in VS. Orcas CTPS, on the other hand, have been virtually useless. The WPF designer crashed regularly and was slower than waiting for me do math in my head. This may be due to the Virtual PC requirements, since they hadn’t yet worked out the issue of Visual Studio 2005 and Orcas living happily side-by-side.
Anyway’s, as of today, there is a better #2. Orcas has hit Beta 2. Go get it. There are Express SKU’s too, so don’t worry if you aren’t an MSDN Subscriber, you can join the party too.
Happy coding – go make something cool.
