How to Make Avalon and Indigo Beta 1 RC Run

Introduction

This article will show you how to set up Avalon and Indigo on your computer. But, before we do that, let's have a look at why you would want to install them on your already full computer!

As you might know, Microsoft has "just" launched a Beta 1 Release Candidate of WinFX.
WinFX contains two major components:

1. Avalon
2. Indigo

Let's see what each of them does.

Avalon

Avalon is the next graphics subsystem for Windows. It will enable users to have a richer user experience while using their computer, and will enable developers to create more spectacular applications more easily.

The idea behind Avalon is that you should not have both code and GUI developed by a single person. This is because a good programmer is, in most cases, a poor designer. Microsoft thought that it would be nice if a programmer could focus on developing the business logic of an application and let a professional designer take care of the interface.

So, a programmer would continue to write his code in C#, and a designer will use XAML to design the interface. XAML is an XML-based language that controls the graphics subsystem. Even though you can write XAML in Notepad, a designer could use a professional application to create the GUI and then simply export it to XAML.

This is, in a few words, what Avalon is all about. It separates the business logic from the GUI and allows different people to work simultaneously on it.

Indigo

As I have not played much (at all) with Indigo, all I can tell you about it is that it is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems.

Problems Installing WinFX

Ok. Let's get to the main part of the article.

I tried to install the WinFX Beta 1 RC onto my computer this weekend. Unfortunately for me, I did not read the installation instructions for it.

I am writing this article because there may be people like me that had problems with WinFX and could not find any help on the Internet (I've looked).

In my case, the problem was that I had already installed Whidbey Beta 2 and I was trying to install WinFX SDK.

I had downloaded an ISO image of the WinFX SDK and burnt it on a CD. I started the installation and everything worked just fine. However, when I tried to create a new Avalon project, I found that Whidbey threw an error. It said that it could not access a certain Temp directory.

After looking at which process had locked the file, I found that Visual Studio .NET was the one that was accessing the file. Hmmm, I thought.

I Googled for Avalon and Indigo problems... and found no reference with that title. Everybody was saying that WinFX was compatible with Visual Studio .NET 2005.

After a few installs and uninstalls of Visual Studio .NET and WinFX, I found the problem.

In order to be able to run WinFX SDK, you must already have installed the WinFX redistributable. So simple...

After installing that, everything worked!

The Solution

1. Make sure you are running either Windows 2003 Server or Windows XP SP2
2. Install the redistributable
3. Install the SDK

Conclusion

Well, I know this is not such a technical article, but hope this helps someone!

For more information, read this.

Happy coding!

History

• 25^th July, 2005: Initial post