InfoQ Homepage Rich Client / Desktop Content on InfoQ
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Spotify's Journey to a Unified Codebase for Its Web and Desktop Clients
Spotify recently published an account of their journey towards a unified codebase for their web and desktop clients. Spotify's team was the owner of a web-player and a separate, full-featured desktop client. Due to having to implement many features twice, they were not shipping at the pace they wanted. Now Spotify created one codebase for both, resulting in an improved development cadence.
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Modernizing Windows Desktop Applications with XAML Islands
You may be under the impression that Windows desktop development is pretty much dead, yet according to the telemetry data in Visual Studio, there are roughly 2.4 million developers actively working on desktop applications each month, up 50% from 20 months ago. With such a large community to support, Microsoft is looking at ways to help developers integrate those assets into Windows 10.
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New UWP and Win32 Application Distribution Models
.NET has had support for applications that can automatically update themselves since the introduction of ClickOnce technology in 2005. Under the ClickOnce model, WinForms and WPF applications would check a pre-configured location on startup for newer versions. Soon the same capability will be available for private distributed UWP applications.
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Windowing in Universal Windows Platform (UWP) Applications
Continuing our series on UWP for line of business applications, we turn our attention to another frequently cited issue: multiple window support. Microsoft intends to not only answer that request, but surpass it with multiple windowing modes including 3D.
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A Look at the Windows Community Toolkit for UWP
In order to address the needs of line of business developers, Microsoft is offering the Windows Community Toolkit for UWP. With two major releases in as many months, this library acts as a test ground for new UWP controls and features.
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Microsoft Positions UWP for Line of Business Applications
Microsoft is positioning UWP for traditional line of business (LOB) applications with an emphasis on rapid application development (RAD) using the Windows Template Studio. But that’s not all they’re doing to entice LOB developers onto the UWP platform.
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An Introduction to the Windows Template Studio for Desktop Development
Over the last couple of decades, the amount of boilerplate code necessary to develop Windows applications has increased dramatically, which takes away from .NET’s early roots as a RAD or Rapid Application Development framework. Microsoft’s attempt to counter-act this is the Windows Template Studio for UWP applications.
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Multithreading and WPF 4.5
WPF 4.5 has improved its support for multi-threaded data binding, but the technique is still risky. This report attempts to explain how it works and what’s involved in using it safely.
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Binding Enhancements in WPF 4.5
Though it isn’t in the spotlight any more, WPF still continues to be a key-stone for rich client development on Windows. With full access to the .NET libraries and the underlying operating system, no other HTML or .NET-based UI technology can match it. Recognizing its importance, Microsoft is continuing to invest in improving WPF and especially its binding capabilities.
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PhoneGap Status: Moving to Apache and Adobe, Plugin Modularization, PhoneGap/Build Service
Working with PhoneGap is getting easier: Plugins make PhoneGap more modular and extensible for developers. PhoneGap/Build is an online service for automatically building PhoneGap applications for different platforms. InfoQ talked to Nitobi's Brian LeRoux about the technical future of PhoneGap at Adobe and Apache.
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Updated:Adobe Donating Flex to Open Source Foundation; Continues Fire Sale on Formerly-Core Software
Hot on the heels of news that Adobe is abandoning developing Flash for mobile devices, Adobe has also now announced its intention to donate the Flex SDK to "an established open source foundation".
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Oracle Sets Out Two Year Plan for Client-side Java
Given that Oracle is predominantly focused on enterprise software, it has been tempting to assume that the vendor would largely ignore client-side Java. It became clear at JavaOne this year, however, that Oracle is making a renewed push on the desktop, spearheaded by JavaFX. It will also be open-sourcing the entire JavaFX platform via OpenJDK.
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JavaFX 2, a Completely New Client Layer for the JavaSE Platform, Now in Public Beta
The first public beta of JavaFX 2.0, Oracle's Java orientated rich client platform, is available for download, along with a beta plugin for NetBeans 7. JavaFX 2 represents a major update to the client-side Java stack, offering an alternative to the entire client layer of the JavaSE platform.
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What to look forward to in WPF vNext
With all the focus on Silverlight, and more recently HTML 5, a lot of people have been wondering about the future of WPF. This in quite understandable, as silence from Microsoft’s press machine often means that the project is on hold, possibly forever. However, it could also mean they aren’t ready to reveal what they are working on.
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MacRuby Roundup: Ruby Apps Show Up in Mac AppStore, MacRuby in Lion, XCode 4 Support
The MacRuby team's busy working towards MacRuby 1.0, recently with the 0.10 release which adds XCode 4 support. Meanwhile, the first applications written using MacRuby have shown up in the Mac AppStore. Also: MacRuby seems to be part of the upcoming "Lion", Mac OS X 10.7.