Cider February CTP Release Notes

Welcome to the February Community Technology Preview of Cider, the Visual Designer for the Windows Presentation Foundation. This is our third public release, and is an incremental improvement over the January 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 January 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 January CTP

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

Installing the February CTP

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

Note: The February CTP does not work with Express editions of Visual Studio 2005. We are considering this for later ""CTPs"".

Uninstalling the February 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."

Both of these options will leave intact the original functionality of Visual Studio 2005.