Comments on: What the heck is Microsoft Iris? Here are my notes thus far.

By: saivert

saivert — Tue, 18 May 2010 22:26:00 +0000

what about the UI language/framework that was used to build the UI stuff in Windows XP Explorer’s sidebar.
I know someone managed to edit this code and design their own stuff with it. MS also used this in some of the control panel applets.
You can use a resource editor to peek at the code.

By: Machiventa

Machiventa — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 23:58:35 +0000

Sorry to jump off topic but do any of you know how to change things in the Zune software such as font colors? We used to be able to do it quite easily without much coding knowledge but I’m stumped on the post-4.0 software.

By: Brad

Brad — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 05:30:49 +0000

I just bounced around the code for the UIX stuff in the Zune folder in .Net Reflector. It is not a small amount of code. Really smells like they reinvented the wheel instead of going the WPF route. They do some very bizarre things over there at MS sometimes…

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:54:25 +0000

No surprise really, given it’s the Zune team and they have an aversion to WPF and Silverlight. This is simply another .NET library built on top of DX. Same as Zune app and Media Center.
The downside to this (for consumers) is that the Phone GUI (and even Zune desktop) will be harder to port to the web as a Silverlight app. I was hoping that we would see elements of the Metro in Windows Live wave 4.

By: Austin Wise

Austin Wise — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:52:05 +0000

Have you seen Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone. It let’s you use Silverlight or XNA to create apps. The Silverlight ones come with a pile of style definitions that make it look like Metro or whatever type are calling that look.

I wonder if Iris will still yet see the light of day. It’s kinda amusing how many of these UI frameworks Microsoft has made.

It’s possible to get around Application.Initialize()’s check of it’s caller’s public key by having some other code in Iris call Initialize(). DeferredCall would work for example.
It’s kinda hard to get much farther than an empty window because it seems you need to be able to create UIX files and :effort: on creating those binary files without tools.