28 April 2007
Vista's doing well, which means WPF = Good.
I see a lot of hype, street talk around Windows Vista and how it's doing world-wide. It usually ends up in a Apple conversation and it gets noisy from there.
At any rate, Microsoft announced yesterday that we are essentially growing the Windows Vista & Office market well. You can read more if you want the specifics below, but what does all this mean for developers?
In context, it means that Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications are shaping up to be a realistic discussion around going beyond the browser experience with approaches like (XBAP) for example. As you don't download .NET 3.0 runtime, it's free inside the operating system and some applications I've seen inside WPF have super small payloads attached to them and do significantly a lot.
A classic example in the WPF space is Expression Blend itself, as when you remove the Sample Source Code Examples, you're left with approx under 20mb in size. I'd argue the actual Help file takes up a large piece of that as well. Overall, that's pretty damn exciting as not only does Expression Blend use WPF pieces to then create WPF (so dog fooding)
There is room to move here folks and with success stories like New York Times reader being profiled out there, it offers a compelling argument going forward in terms of adopting Microsoft User Experience offerings.
It doesn't stop there, SideBar Gadgets is probably one of the coolest features in Windows Vista as you can do some very creative and interesting things with it. You can use this in LOB applications to snapshot pieces of the application and so on.
Bottom line, now is the time to get your mind around WPF, what it means to you, what you can do with it and start thinking about adding it to your development roadmap going forward.
[ Continue to NYT article on how well it's doing - that or read it inside NYT Reader itself! ]
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Scott Barnes currently is a Rich Platform Product Manager (WPF & Silverlight). He has been working with Adobe/Macromedia technology for the past 10 years with a main focus specifically on Internet Applications (aka. RIA, Rich Client Technology etc).
Scott first started out as a graphic designer in the late 90’s and over the years developed a passion for programmatic art (Designer + Developer mind). He recently has branched out further into 3D modelling and animation making full use of both his designer + developer mindset.
"..The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man..." - George Bernard Shaw
