It’s a few days into October, so where is WPF/E? At Mix06 the date for the first CTP was announced as “Q3 2006” or “summer 2006” (and generally when Americans say “summer 2006” they mean “summer for the NORTHERN HEMISPHERE 2006”…anyway…another rant). So where is it, huh? WPF/E PM bloggers Mike Harsh and Joe Stegman have been very quiet since then. Now I know what some of you might be thinking….“WPF/E has never seen the light of day, it was always vapour just to spook Adobe/Macromedia and they were never going to ship it”. Not true - WPF/E will be the foundation for Microsoft’s XPS renderer for the Mac platform, and thus (as far as I understand) necessary for viewing all those nice documents that Office 2007 is going to be producing. Also when I was working at MS earlier this year I downloaded some of the internal builds and I have no doubt about how real it is. Now all they need to do is just release a CTP. It doesn’t have to be perfect (based on the early Cider CTPs I know there are other teams inside MS who understand just how imperfect a CTP can be), but they should honour that commitment and give us something.
Update: William Luu posted this link to the ausdotnet mailing list from a mozilla developer who’s been in contact with the WPF/E folk in Redmond. It’s great to hear about progress like this on the Mozilla front. Just to be clear I HAVE seen some nightly builds of it and DO believe it will ship. I’m just wondering what the holdup is.