The time has come to publish our second version of Vidyano. Starting today, you can download the Vidyano 2.0 from the Visual Studio Extension Gallery (Vidyano 2.0) or directly from your Visual Studio environment using the Extension Manager.

What changed? Here is a short list of the most important changes:

• Architectural change from MVC to MVVM
  • With Vidyano 2.0 we decided follow the road that the community is taking when it comes to developing WPF applications. We therefore reformed our architecture to be more MVVM based rather than strict MVC. Given the amount of support currently available in the community, this should help developers to grasp the architectural concepts behind Vidyano a bit easier.

• Moving to the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
  • Vidyano 1.x was based on the Microsoft Add-In Framework (MAF). Although the MAF was powerful enough to support the design we want to enforce, it was also a bit too heavy for our case. With the introduction of the MEF we have the same features that we took advantage of, but with a lot less overhead. This increases the overall performance of applications written with Vidyano 2.0 by a great deal.

• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0
  • The second release of Vidyano is completely based on the next version of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Applications written with Vidyano hereby automatically receive a huge performance increase, while taking advantage of the many new features that the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 offers.  

• Visual Studio 2010 Integration
  • Vidyano 2.0 is, just as is predecessor, fully integrated in the Visual Studio environment. The fact that Visual Studio 2010 runs on top of the Windows Presentation Foundation Framework allows the Vidyano designers and wizards to integrate even deeper. 

• Easier deployment with ClickOnce
  • With this next version of Vidyano we make deploying your applications even smoother. Developers can now use the default ClickOnce wizards to deploy their applications. 

• Removed the SQL Server Compact Edition requirement
  • Vidyano 1.x required applications to have a repository to store application data. Our second release of Vidyano removed this requirement, embedding this data in the application bootstrapper. 

Thereby we encourage you to provide feedback of any kind, so that we may improve the quality of this release even more.

-- The  Vidyano Team

Kontich, Belgium — February 8th 2010. Rhea NV, Visual Studio Industry Partner, announced today that it plans to simultaneously-ship a new version of Vidyano with Visual Studio 2010.

Applications build with Vidyano, embedded in the Visual Studio 2010 environment, will once again take full advantage of the very latest in .NET technology. Developers will be able to use the same Vidyano wizards, editors and custom tool generators as they did with previous versions. It will help them to become even more productive in creating rich client applications for the .NET platform.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

We are proud to announce our next release of Vidyano, version 1.4.

New features and improvements

• Dialog Service: It is now possible to show messages to the user. The same service can also be used to show an open file or save file dialog.
  
  
• Event Handlers: Developers can use the same HandledByController command to handle any event on a Control.
  
  
• More Services: All services can now be used in each logical part (Module, View) of the application. Dialogs, Translations, ...
  
  
• Authentication Service: The Vidyano Authentication process can now be easily tweaked to filter available modules or use a completely different authentication system.

Once again, we are proud to announce our next release of Vidyano, version 1.2.

Since we officially launched the first version of Vidyano, we have been getting a lot of valuable feedback from our customers and people playing around with the trial version. A lot of this feedback has already been processed and incorporated in this build, going from bug fixes to new features.

New features and improvements

• OpenPage / HandledByController Part Generator: It is now possible to add OpenPage or HandledByController command buttons on a page by using the wizard. Developers can also choose which argument to pass by simply selecting it from a list that contains all compatible arguments in a given context.

• Event-system for cross module communication: Modules are now able to communicate with each other by using the new event-system. Modules can register for specific events on which they would like to listen.

• Constructor arguments: Developers can now use the Vidyano designers to add constructor arguments to page controllers. This comes in handy when using it in combination with the new OpenPage part generator.

• Module designers: The look and feel of the module designers has been improved slightly so that more space is available to display the layout of the page.

• Improved page layout parsing: The Vidyano page designer has been improved so that it is able to render a lot more xaml scenarios.

• Larger models: Previous versions of Vidyano had trouble with larger models; this version has been improved so that the performance doesn't suffer too much.

• Visual Studio code optimized: We have been reworking some internal code in order to better support changes in the Visual Studio environment, such as the upcoming VS2010 (expect a CTP version soon).

• Shell Adorners: The default layout of the ShellContainer has been improved with additional AdornerDecorators.

• Versioning: This is also the first public version of Vidyano which shows your modules automatically take advantage of the versioning system. Modules which have been build and deployed against the previous version don't have to be recompiled or deployed as they will use the internal adapter system.

As stated in the list of improvements, we have begon working on our Visual Studio 2010 compatible release. All Visual Studio related code (EnvDTE) has been refactored in a separate assembly, Vidyano.VisualStudio.VS90, so that we can adapt to changes more quickly. We expect to release a public CTP version pretty soon.

We would like to thank everyone who has provided us with valuable feedback over the past couple months and hope to keep hearing from you.

- The Vidyano Team

After the beta version, the RC and a lot of internal stress tests, we released the final version of Vidyano. We are very proud of the result and we feel that we have achieved what we intended for this release. Vidyano greatly reduces development time and lets you build applications on a solid architecture out of the box.

As announced, we will offer a trial version of Vidyano for free. Please check the Download page.

Changes and updates since the Release Candidate:

• It is now possible to use an ADO.NET Data Service Context or any custom Context as Data Model. 
  
• The Entity Presenter has been extended to support more different property types.   
  
• More LayoutTemplates have been added to use different Panel types.
  
• The Visual Studio designers have been improved.
  
• Renamed Module Query to Data Block.
  
• Added the ability to translate the Vidyano Shell.
  
• You can now choose a Module and EntryPoint that will be shown at startup.
  
• Improved startup performance for Vidyano applications.

Vidyano will automatically detect whether your project was built using the Release Candidate version and offer a very easy upgrade experience.

In order to support the launch of Vidyano, our website was also updated. It is now possible to buy a Vidyano license from our webshop using paypal. The underlying structure has been rebuild and now uses the brand new ASP.NET MVC.

Again, we greatly welcome your feedback, please don't hesitate to make use of our community forums. We are glad to answer any questions on Vidyano you may have. 

- The Vidyano Team

The Vidyano Team is proud to announce the next version of Vidyano.

This release is marked as Release Candidate for which we offer our customers complete support. In other words, you are allowed to write production code and deploy your application. As mentioned before, we have redesigned our website to give you a clean overview on our architecture, the new license policy and pricing.

We also released some preliminary documentation, both class library and usage guide. For the current Vidyano release, these will be updated frequently in the upcoming weeks. This will include guides on how to make use of Vidyano's rich extensibility by writing custom Part Generators and Layout Templates. 

Changes and updates since our last public release:

Release Candidate (November 25, 2008) 

• Added the Browse Data Source dialog for creating a connection string.
  
• It is now possible to create your own custom Part Generators and Layout Templates.
  
• You can now add a new module via the Project -> Add New Item menu.
• Fixed a bug where the Entity Presenter would not show during design time.
  
• Added XML comments to all public code elements.
  
• Initial, preliminary, documentation  is now available.
  
• Improved add-in version resilience on Modules, Part Generators and Layout Templates.

Beta 2 (October 30, 2008) 

• Fixed a bug regarding the namespace when using Entity Framework as model. 
• Fixed a bug when a project in your solution was unloaded. 
  
• It is now possible to change the layout template for an existing page.
  
• The licensing model for Vidyano has been revised completely, see Licensing in the documentation.
  
• A number of performance improvements on both the Visual Studio and Runtime side of Vidyano.
• Vidyano will now prompt for login credentials when connecting to a secured repository.

We greatly welcome your feedback, so please don't hesitate to make use of our community forums. We are glad to answer any questions on Vidyano you may have. 

- The Vidyano Team

In light of the new Vidyano release, which is coming soon, we have redesigned our website. This should give you a better idea on what Vidyano is, and what it can do for you.

We are still working out the last details before we will make the new version available as a public download. 
Keep watching this blog for more info.