Posted on

ClickOnce Deployment in Firefox

ClickOnce is a Microsoft deployment mechanism for WinForms and WPF applications that works great in Internet Explorer. Thanks to an extension, you can also get ClickOnce applications to work from Firefox too. FFClickOnce was created by James Dobson. Check out the homepage where James describes what it does and how it works very nicely.

In this silly season where many people are racing to download and run WPF applications, this extension will make it easier.

[via Scott Stanfield – who does a great job evangelizing Firefox]

Posted on

Report from CHI 2007

I was part of a session at CHI 2007 on Thursday titled “User Interface Description Languages: XUL & XAML.” The session covered some of the benefits of declarative UIs, especially with respect to the designer/developer iterative process. Scott Stanfield and myself demonstrated building UIs in XAML and XUL, respectively. We tried to show how easy it was to create and modify UI prototypes. Also, how the prototype markup could be used by developers to create the production UI, even while designers tweaked pieces along the way.

I was a little nervous coding up a prototype UI in front of the filled room, but everyone did a great job of helping me with my spelling errors and missing end tags. Someone referred to it as “pair programming on a massive scale.” It was fun and I’d be glad to do it again.

Thanks to Scooter Morris for putting it together. Here’s a link to my slideshow and prototype XUL UI (requires Firefox 3 alpha or XULRunner 1.9 alpha for the new timepicker and slider controls).