Captain Black Turtleneck Rides Again
I really have to hand it to the boys from Redmond. At long last, they've come through for us corporate developers. And not in small measure, either.
When Visual Studio .NET launched, back in the early days of this century, the designer that shipped was pretty woeful. You know it. They knew it. I mean, Allaire's HomeSite, which had been out for a few years by then, handled design better. Sure, sure, you could code purely in HTML, and that's what you really had to do with VS 2002/2003. Or you could use DreamWeaver, which is what many did. Of course, nothing beats Visual Studio when it comes to back-end coding, and as a corporate developer that's Job #1, but it would have been nice to easily do design work and set up web pages without having to sketch out a design on paper (how yesteryear) and then code to that in HTML.
With Visual Studio 2005, things have gotten much better. You can drag tables around and resize stuff, and it's all getting better all the time. Hurrah.
. . . but then . . .
I downloaded Microsoft Interactive Designer, and whoa! WPF is really the nuclear option of design. XAML rocks, in an arbitrary-cool sort of way. Microsoft has created some seriously freaked-out juicy goodness for the black turtleneck crowd. I fully anticipate seeing hordes of atrocious acid-induced designs with this stuff. RichTextBoxes all askew. Kaleidoscopic gradients, fading in and out as you type. There's all kinds of gnarly abuses that this will unleash upon the world. (Check out my own humble picture of RichTextBox gone bad.) I think it's great.
Of course, it will be some time before enough users have upgraded to Vista, and have a P4 with 1Gb+ RAM and a blazing fragmaster video card. Which is what seems to be the real-world requirement for running WPF apps.
Well, as I go back to my seemingly mundane OO-laced coding lifestyle, with business objects and data tiers, Web Services and remoting, I now get to look forward to tinkering with some nifty designer toys. At last. Thanks, guys.