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

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.