Cider January CTP Release Notes

Welcome to the January Community Technology Preview of Cider, the Visual Designer for the Windows Presentation Foundation. This is our second public release, and is an incremental improvement over the December CTP We are making progress, but there are still quite a few rough edges in addition to many just plain unfinished pieces of business.

Similarly to the previous December CTP this release of Cider supports basic "form" creation and "XAML Preview". The big improvement we've made is to the Grid design experience. Erick (PM on layout) walks you through some of the improvements we’ve made here

Please give us your feedback!

Let us know what you like and what you don't like. What are the things that are missing today that stop you from using Cider? What are your "must have" features? Stop by and give us feeback on the MSDN forum for Cider

Uninstalling the December CTP

Before you install the January CTP please make sure you uninstall the December CTP!

Installing the January CTP

The Cider January CTP requires the January CTP releases of other components. And, of course, you'll need Visual Studio 2005.
* WinFX Runtime Components January CTP
* Windows SDK January CTP
* Visual Studio 'Orcas' January CTP (which includes Cider)

Note: The January CTP does not work with Express editions of Visual Studio 2005. We are working to improve this in later ""CTPs"".

Uninstalling the January CTP

Well, if you're "done" with Cider, or you've found a bug that is blocking your work, you have several options.

If you just don't want the designer to come up when you double-click a XAML file, you can right-click on the XAML file in the Solution Explorer, select "Open With…", then select the XML Editor and check the "Set as default" option. This will cause the XAML file to always open in the XML editor.

If there's some huge problem that you cannot work around and you cannot change the XAML file association, you can uninstall the entire Visual Studio "Orcas" CTP. Go to "Add/Remove Programs" and uninstall something that looks like the "Visual Studio Code Name 'Orcas' Community Technology Preview - ""WinFX"" Development Tools."