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

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.