[wix-devs] WiX v4 Opportunity: New WixBA UI

Mon Jul 11 11:51:39 PDT 2016

I'll take a look when I come up for air this evening.

--
John Merryweather Cooper
Senior Software Engineer | Integration Development Group | Enterprise Notification Service
Jack Henry & Associates, Inc.® | Lenexa, KS  66214 | Ext:  431050 |JoCooper at jackhenry.com

-----Original Message-----
From: wix-devs [mailto:wix-devs-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org] On Behalf Of Phill Hogland
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2016 6:33 PM
To: WiX Toolset Developer Mailing List <wix-devs at lists.wixtoolset.org>
Subject: Re: [wix-devs] WiX v4 Opportunity: New WixBA UI

The e-mail below is from an external source.  Please do not open attachments or click links from an unknown or suspicious origin.

Greetings;

I did a little work on a face lift for WixBA v4 using the contoso screen shot that Rob linked as a guide.  I am interested in feedback as to whether this is the general direction that you were thinking of going in.  I am sure that there is a need for more refactoring and checking for code style variants, but I wanted to share what I have done so far and maybe that will help in defining a wip or indicating what should be changed.  Maybe brian wants to jump in an implement some of his ideas also.  I have not looked at control focus, tab order, or related issues yet.  Just like the old WixBA (but not my mba) for some reason I have to click a button to get the focus and then click it to activate it. Annoying, and I know I tracked that issue down in my mba once before, but I did not try to find that solution just yet.

The branch is here:

https://github.com/phillHgl/wix4/tree/WixBAFacelift

I did basic testing of Install, repair, and uninstall phases, but I need to pound on it harder before I was going to do a pull request.  I also need to figure out how to do a private release build so that I can utilize other machines when testing.

I have several areas of questions, for which I added notes, but I am a bit tired now so think I will go over that later.  I started to use the System.Window.Shell Chrome WPF class but I backed that out and opted to create the window chrome directly.  I understood that there is a desire to match Win 10 behavior, for which the Chrome clase might be more ideal, but pre-Win 8 and pre-Net45 are not supported as I understood the documentation.  I was not sure what WixV4 plans to target in this regard so I backed the Chrome class out for now.  I also did not implement the window min/max buttons in the chrome yet, and the window is not user resizable.  We did not support that in the past and to support them will introsuce some other challenges, so I wanted to be clear on what the expectations are before going down that path.  Since leveraged several styles from my mba I also added some support for high contrast themes and accessibility.

Do you know of a functional "win 10" style setup that I can download and run on a test box, so that I can get a better idea of the desired behavior?

Thanks for any feedback.

Phill

________________________________
From: wix-devs <wix-devs-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org> on behalf of brian.e.drennan at outlook.com <brian.e.drennan at outlook.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 10:54:15 PM
To: WiX Toolset Developer Mailing List
Subject: Re: [wix-devs] WiX v4 Opportunity: New WixBA UI

My school load will go down this week. Do you have any design docs together yet?

I've never looked at the bundle source, but I imagine it's MVVM, so the work consists mostly of redesigning the layout and changing some view models?

On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 2:12 PM -0400, "Phill Hogland" <phill.hogland at rimage.com> wrote:

In general, I am interested, and I hope that my current work workload will wind down, letting me contribute more to wix.

I modeled my original mba on the metro grid view similar to the v3.8 WixBA, but that made supporting different locals and adding 'options' difficult.  Over time I have evolved to a look that is more similar to the Contoso screen shots at the link you shared. I did this by reworking the View(s) so I think that your proposed rewrite could be done on top of the existing WixBA project structure.   Since I wanted to use a single mba for multiple bundles I came up with a scheme to sub-class the Model for each (or a group of similar) bundles and use the BundleTag to switch different Models and View(s) in place.  My product manager wanted a 'mobile' phone look that was wizard less and scrolls down to less important advanced options, if any.

________________________________________
From: wix-devs <wix-devs-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org> on behalf of Rob Mensching <rob at firegiant.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 12:06:24 PM
To: wix-devs at lists.wixtoolset.org
Subject: [wix-devs] WiX v4 Opportunity: New WixBA UI

I want to throw this idea out for someone interested in doing some work in WiX v4. Hopefully, someone will be interested in picking it up. If so, I'll offer to write the WIP.

The WixBA today is very *different*. That was a conscious decision to demonstrate how much more you can do with UI in Bundles. Some people thought the UI was cool, some people never liked it. That was okay.

However today, the UI is getting "old". It needs a refresh and WiX v4 is a great place to put it.

So, I'd like to propose that we make the WiX v4.0 WixBA UI look like the new Appx installer UI: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/app-installer/9nblggh4nns1

There are a lot of random reasons why I think this is a good idea. It's a clean UI that is not a wizard. We'll get back to something simple. Also, it'll be associated with "future of installation UI" looking just like what is available in Windows 10. Plus, it should be *really* easy to implement in WPF. <smile/>

Hopefully someone (or even a couple people) would be interested in picking this project up.

Regards,

  Rob Mensching
  CEO
  FireGiant
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