The next revolution in the software foundation for Microsoft's architecture is here. It's called WPF - Windows Presentation Foundation.

This is no minor fix. It's a full-scale new direction that will become the mainstream way to program your application. It's available now and now is the time to start learning it.

Some of the main features:

• Design is separate from coding.
  Right now, the programmer does most of the design because it's all done in one step. WPF features an XML based declarative design called "XAML". Instead of dragging and dropping components onto forms, you build an XML file that "declares" what the design will look like. (VB.NET 2008 has "drag and drop" tools that make the process somewhat similar, but the end result is still a XAML file.) The application code doesn't depend on what the design looks like and can be done independently.

• The interface is a vector display instead of a raster display.
  Instead of 1024 by 768 small dots (the most common resolution - your monitor may be different), graphics are created by drawing lines, called vectors, for each and every thing that appears on the screen. It may seem like it's more complicated (and, in some ways, it is) but consider these advantages:
  • Hardware graphics acceleration (that is, the hot new video cards) can do the job using the new DirectX technology used for games. That isn't possible with raster graphics.
  • Images are scalable. A 500 percent image still looks good.
  • A vector image can be converted into a raster image, but the reverse isn't possible.

• And, of course, there are scads of new, cool, components in WPF!

Because most of WPF is the new XAML coding, there's not a lot out there that addresses the Visual Basic programmer's questions.

VB.NET Solution Explorer

A home for all your project files

An About Visual Basic reader just sent me this comment:

Level 1

Level 2

It may be obvious, but if I store a Word 2007 ".docx" file in the same folder as are stored the Form.vb files for a VB 2008 project, and then click on "Refresh", the .docx file duly appears in the list of accessible objects.

And, mirabile dicu, if I (double)click on it in that selfsame list, it opens ... in Word 2007!!!

By golly, someone did something correctly!

It's certainly one way of maintaining concurrent documentation.

-----------

Very good point! But it goes well beyond that.

A lot of people forget that Microsoft designed Visual Studio to be a complete development environment for all kinds of files. Common text files are one of the file types that you can "Add" right from the Solution Explorer menu.

But you can create any file type in the solution and VB.NET will let you manage it inside Solution Explorer. Not only Word, Excel, and other Microsoft products, but purely proprietary types will open with the program specified by their file extension.

Some file types, like XML and HTM, can be edited with VB.NET support including Intellisense and error correction