Longhorn lowdown: What's up?

• Tags:
• Avelon,
• Windows 2006,
• Indigo,
• WinFS

Robert W. McLaws

Published: 17 Nov 2004 14:50 GMT

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Extending Avalon's reach
The next piece of news that affects all developers relates to Avalon, the new desktop management system for Longhorn. Microsoft talked to a lot of independent software vendors (ISVs) and other enterprises about the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) bits, and some of the new capabilities possible with Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) programming. XAML is a way to write code using an XML-like syntax that can be opened up like a document, and compiled on the fly. Its greatest potential lies in its ability to bring the UI separation model inherent to ASP.NET development down to the desktop.

That's great news for software developers who can't design an intuitive user interface to save their lives. They can leave that work to the graphic design professionals now. That model has worked very well in ASP.NET development circles, and should work well here too. Look for a number of professional design tools from Adobe, Macromedia and others, to start supporting XAML output in the next 6-12 months.

But the feedback Microsoft got was that Longhorn would lack the install base for it to make sense for ISVs to start targeting it exclusively. Microsoft says it will be "widely available" in 2006, but that doesn't mean it will be "widely installed" anytime before the next even-numbered year. I mean, some companies still don't think that the security, usability and stability improvements in Windows XP are enough reason to upgrade from Windows 98 and 2000, so ISVs can't be banking on huge enterprise Longhorn rollouts within the first six months it is available.

So Microsoft decided that the best course of action would be to backport many of the features in Avalon Longhorn onto Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. This is great news for developers, because now the ease of XAML programming will be available on older platforms. There are going to be some performance issues to solve, as Joe Beda, formerly of the Avalon team, described in his blog. Avalon wasn't designed for the Windows XP Driver Model, so it's just not going to be able to do the kinds of graphic enhancements it can on Longhorn's hardware-rendered desktop. But just because Avalon runs on Windows XP, doesn't mean that there still isn't a valid reason to run it on Longhorn. It will still be extremely compelling, as Joe discussed at length before jumping ship for Google.

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