Coding4Fun Developer Kit 2008 Vol.1 Beta Released on Codeplex
Recently, I have been spending most of my time helping put together the Coding4Fun Developer Kit that was released today on Codeplex. This is a Kit put together by Microsoft to open up many of the new and powerful APIs avaiable in Vista and Visual Studio 2008 to enable simple programming interfaces that can be used from managed code.
This developer kit contains .net wrappers and sample projects for the following Vista APIs
- Bluetooth
- Contacts
- Digital Sound Recording
- Messaging/Email
- Picture Sharing
- Picture Acquisition
- Power Management
- Preview Handlers
- Feeds
- Desktop Search
I made two big contributions to this developer kit. The first was building the Preview Handler Wrapper. This Wrapper included enhancing the managed preview handler framework built by Stephen Toub and published in the January Edition of MSDN Magazine. In addition, I wrote a managed preview handler host, to enable displaying any preview handler within a .net winform application. Watch for my next post describing, Hosting File Previews In Managed Code. My other contribution to the project was pulling the various projects together and building the installer. I used WIX. It was a tedious process at times, but ultimately pretty effective. I promise to write another post detailing my experience with WIX and what I did to put this installer together.
Check out the codeplex site for the Coding4Fun Developer Kit 2008 vol.1. Definitely some cool and interesting stuff.