What’s changed for app developers since //build/ (part 1)

The Consumer Preview is now available and hopefully, you’ve had a chance to see what we’ve been up to. Our engineering team has been working hard since //build/. We’ve been listening to your feedback and using it to improve our development platform. At the same time, we’ve been putting the finishing touches on lots of platform features that you haven’t seen before.


Along with the work we did directly on Windows, we’ve also improved our Visual Studio tools substantially since //build/. There have been improvements for Metro style app development and for other scenarios as well. I’ll talk about Metro style development here, but if you’re interested in other VS features, Jason Zander’s blog is a great place to start.

We know that you’ve been busy too. You started over 5,000 different threads on the MSDN Developer Preview forums and posted close to 30,000 messages. Our telemetry also tells us that you’ve been using

XAML Tools

XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) is one of the most exciting innovations to come out of Microsoft in years.  It finally enables you to easily bridge the gap between designers and developers.  XAML promises to save companies a lot of time, money, and frustration.  XAML is used in WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation, and WPF/E, now named Silverlight.  WPF applications run native on Windows Vista, and Silverlight applications run anywhere, after installing an insanely small browser plugin.
Below is a complete listing of XAML Tools you can use today to build interactive user interfaces and applications that run on WPF and Silverlight.

Icons or other visuals with XAML instead of bitmaps

You want to use vector images in your Silverlight project instead of bitmaps? In this tutorial I’ll show you how.

Buttons with vector images

Start Expression Blend and place a button on the Grid.

When u use a *.PNG icon, you can drag this on the button. But we are going to draw a little magnifying glass icon with Expression Blend. Rightclick the button in the Objects and Timeline tab and choose: Edit Additional Templates | Edit generated Content | Create Empty…

Choose a name and hit OK