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Thursday, September 02, 2004

A Longhorn blog worth reading

Not this one, but Miguel de Icaza's comment on the recent changes. Miguel is the chief Mono hacker and deserves respect; he's an open-source champion but in some respects an admirer of Microsoft's technology (otherwise there would be no Mono). I think he makes some great points here.
My take? I'm not surprised that WinFs is slipping; it always seemed to me that there were some fundamental aspects that had not been thought through. But I think making Avalon and Indigo available for XP is a good move and really more significant than the Longhorn cuts. Developers need to target a platform that is widely available, not one that is restricted to the latest Windows release. I don't even care that much about Avalon as a specific API. I do care about Avalon insofar as it represents a better GUI framework than System.Windows.Forms. What's wrong with SWF? First performance; second, lack of scalable layout management; third, memory leaks; fourth, it's too much like the old Visual Basic in the way it encourages you to mix business logic with presentation code. Fix those things and we could manage without Avalon.

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