Dave Massy's Blog : Longhorn

Investment in IE is NOT a Stop-Gap

DMassy — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 23:46:00 GMT

There was one section of the story that got on ZDNet and CNet that I think is worth a response.

"Longhorn isn't going to be delivered in the timeframe Microsoft originally expected, and users probably can't wait that long for a stabilized browser. So as a stop-gap move, they are going to shore up IE," O'Grady said.

This is not the case at all. As Tony Chor the Group Program Manager for IE said on Channel 9 a couple of months ago there is a renewed effort on Internet Explorer. The immediate focus is on security improvements and you can clearly see great progress there in Windows XP SP2. There are currently no plans to release a new version of Internet Explorer prior to Longhorn when it will be delivered as part of the new OS. As the team completes Windows XP SP2 we are starting to think about what we will deliver as a great browser in Longhorn which is why the feedback now is so useful.

Why wait for Avalon?

DMassy — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 18:00:00 GMT

Frank Hillman responded to my previous post of Is XAML a big deal? and asks Why wait for avalon? especially when there are some great tools and libraries available today. That's a great question. In short I don't think you should wait. If you need to get something done today then you should go ahead and use the best tools available on Windows to get the job done.

Having said that I do think it is important to understand that Longhorn is coming and Avalon is a key part of that. I believe Avalon is fundamentally necessary if we are to raise the quality of the user experience for future versions of Windows.

Avalon is important as it provides a full new presentation stack for Windows. This allows us to provide a much higher quality experience and take advantage of hardware acceleration. Currently we are constrained by the current GDI/User based stacks that are the primary way to present content and UI on Windows today. With the new stack we can provide higher quality media, animation etc. It is possible to argue that many of the things Avalon enables you can do today and for some things this is true. However Avalon does make it significantly easier and brings many of these things within easy reach of developers. There are a great many benefits to be had with a new presentation system that natively supports capabilities such as layout, databinding of any property, visual styling of controls and elements etc. all in a consistent way.

Remember though that equally important parts of Longhorn are Fundamentals, Indigo and WinFS. When we bring these parts of Longhorn together we can really offer some much more interesting applications. Avalon is what helps makes the other pillars come to life but it's only when we can find data efficiently and communicate effectively that we see how Longhorn enables a new generation of applications.

Should you wait for Avalon? Probably not but you should be thinking about all the capabilities that Longhorn is going to bring to developers and how this might enable your applications to offer greater capabilities and significantly improved ease of use.
I'd strongly encourage all developers and architects to watch closely the progress we make on Longhorn so that you are ready and prepared when it arrives. Of course don't forget the importance of managed code in Longhorn as well. Managed code and the .NET framework is central to the future of Windows.

So I'd say don't wait, embrace managed code and the .NET framework today but watch Longhorn closely for what it will provide.

Is XAML a big deal?

DMassy — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 21:15:00 GMT

Interesting argument that XAML isn't a big deal at http://weslandia.org/blog/archive/2004/04/02/156.aspx. Am I the only person getting confused on who the people are behind some of the blogs? How about an “About me“ link on the page so I'll know who I'm having the conversation with? Maybe it is there and I just can't see it. As my response was turning into something of length I decided to post here. It's an interesting topic and I'm often slightly split on my thoughts when it comes to the importance of XAML in the whole scheme of things.

If I'm looking at the functionality that is enabled in Longhorn then I can argue that XAML is really not that much of a big deal. After all it is simply a markup language for wiring together .net objects. XAML is not directly related to any of the actual capabilities of the Avalon system in Longhorn. What is interesting is the databinding, element compostion, vector graphics, animation etc. that Avalon provides. XAML is just one way to implement that functionality and I could equally use any .NET language.

However if we think about the new types of application that Avalon and Longhorn allow us to build then XAML is a very big deal. With Longhorn the quality of design in an application will become more important than it is today. Today a designer authors a design for a dialog in an advanced design tool and a developer has to translate that into something that looks correct in a developer tool such as visual studio. If the designer is lucky then they might get something approximating what they originally wanted. However if the designer wishes to adjust the logo in the dialog box then they modify the original in the design tool and the developer once again has to try and implement the change. With XAML it allows both designer and developer to work alongside eachother in the same codebase. The developer works on the functionality that they wish to in a developer language such as C# or managed C++. While the designer can work in a design tool that understands XAML and create some very rich user experiences.
An example of how designers can be bought closer to the creation process can be seen in the Longhorn SDK at http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com/lhsdk/Samples/demos/loginscreen/wcpsamp_demosample_LoginScreen.aspx Here a login page has been created by a developer who wires up all the necessary functionality for a user to login with button handlers etc. The Designer separately creates a set of XAML pages for this to give each user a different look and feel without having to interrupt the developer at all.

Of course all this is going to need a rich powerful design tool for the designers and a development environment that allows designers and developers to work closely together. Having XAML as a first class language that a designer targets though is a very important step in creating an environment where the designer is empowered to directly implement their design thoughts in a real application.

To address a couple of the questions:

Why do I care if a visual designer creates XAML or C#? In fact, why would I want to have my business logic in c# and have my UI in XAML?
As a developer you probably don't care much at all as long as you can access the buttons and other elements that are being placed on the form by the design tool. Although visual design tools are likely to persist in some form of declarative format so that the files can be read and written with some form of fidelity.

We've seen how important markup has been to the internet with HTML and XML. A declarative model is very powerful for certain uses and allows a great deal more productivity and toolability than might be obtained from a purely procedural model.

Of course XAML is actually a very powerful language when combined with the Avalon presentation stack in Longhorn. Take a look at http://www.joemarini.com/tutorials/tutorialpages/xamlblogexplorer.php done entirely in XAML. XAML might not be for everyone but it is very powerful. Maybe people will not even realise they are using it if they are using visual design tools in a few years time!

XAML by itself is not that interesting!

DMassy — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 19:12:00 GMT

Microsoft should drop XAML like a .... Rory Blythe makes a great post and people respond. XAML is just markup and although incredibly important to allow tools to declaratively put Content, UI and Media together it really isn't that interesting by itself. The really interesting stuff in Longhorn can be found if you look at the underlying .NET classes that XAML wires together, look at the Avalon functionality not the markup, look at the WinFS functionality for storage and Indigo for communication. When I look at the complete set of functionality in WinFX I get really excited by what Longhorn is going to bring. Looking at individual parts of Longhorn in isolation is like having your eyes just one inch from a 42“ high definition television screen you see lots of great little dots and maybe can make out part of the picture but you don't see the big picture and it is really difficult to understand the story being told by the TV show.

Avalon != XAML

DMassy — Fri, 06 Feb 2004 19:26:00 GMT

XAML is not Avalon and Avalon is not XAML. I think we've not been making this entirely clear although it has definitely been implied by Don Box, Chris Anderson and others. See the Holiday MSDN TV show to see some of this.
However there seems to be a little confusion here as seen in Dino's unprogramming post so I'll say it again.

XAML is not Avalon and Avalon is not XAML. Avalon is the codename for the new presentation subsystem in Longhorn while XAML is markup for .NET objects. While I don't want to downplay the importance of XAML I do think it's important to understand that anything you can do in XAML can also be done in C#, VB.NET or any .NET language of your choice. That doesn't meant that XAML and Avalon aren't extremely useful together. Take a look at Rob Relyea's blog for the work going on with XAML at the moment, it's Rob's job to ensure that XAML has a syntax to give it great exploitation of Avalon's capabilities. Rob will probably have a word with me for downplaying the importance of XAML next time I see him :-)

So why do I think it's so important to understand that XAML is not the same as Avalon? Well I think that if you are going to understand the full impact that Longhorn is likely to have on the industry then you need to understand all the key areas of Longhorn - Fundamentals, Indigo, WinFS and Avalon. If you think of Avalon as simply XAML it is easy to get distracted by the markup syntax and not see the capabilities provided by the API set around integrated data binding, animation, compositing etc. etc. etc. And when you are focused on the syntax of markup and not the capabilities of the platform it is difficult to see the overall platform.

I hope the Avalon team will continue to talk to me after I say this but I don't actually think Avalon is all that interesting unless you combine it with the capabilities of Indigo and WinFS. Only when you can communicate reliably and securely using Indigo and can find related data quickly and easily using WinFS does the new presentation system in Avalon become really useful. It is the combination of all these abilities in Longhorn that I believe will enable new types of solutions and new types of software and that is my dream for Longhorn - to see people create solutions and software that they only dreamed of before!

Don't get me wrong though I think XAML is super useful and I'll post some ramblings on that shortly.

Why Longhorn and Avalon?

DMassy — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 01:45:00 GMT

I'm excited about Longhorn and Avalon in particular as that is what I'm working on. I thought as one of my first posts here I'd talk about the computer experience I personally see Avalon and Longhorn enabling.

I don't know if anyone else out there watches the CSI and CSI: Miami shows on television (presumably someone else watches them or they would not continue to make the show), they involve Crime Scene Investigators sifting through evidence to find the bad people responsible for the crime. It may not be the best TV show but my fiancé and I often enjoy watching it trying to guess who the bad guy is. However the thing that bugs me about that show (and a lot of other TV shows and films) is the way they show computers working, the computers on these shows have slick interfaces that flash up instant results of a query including a driver's license image and other related data, they offer 3D analysis of tire tread matching, shoe print matching, DNA matching etc etc., even the login screen is slick and inviting. Now we all know that no reasonable computer interface looks like that and although some of those things might be technically feasible today it would probably take more developer effort than could be justified by likely sales of shoe print matching software! At those points in the TV show I just choose to suspend reality and enjoy the show.
So in Longhorn the technologies in Avalon are going to bring the types of user interfaces we see in these shows within the easy reach of developers. Great!

Well of course the cynical among you are probably saying something like “but I actually don't really want something that looks like what they show on TV“ well I'd probably agree with you as the TV shows are always going to show something a little more simplistic than a what might be used in the real world simply so that the viewer can easily follow the plot. That's not to say that elements of what is typically seen on TV aren't useful and isn't something we should provide in the next generation of computer solutions. For many people today computers remain too difficult to use and offering a glitch free user experience that guides you through getting a task done with animation helping show the flow of the task will I believe help here. There's a video of Real Estate on Longhorn at http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/productinfo/ that shows what a future user experience might be with Longhorn. Watch the 3D flyover nearly half way through the video isn't that cool!

To me the vision for Avalon and Longhorn is to put in place a set of technologies that will allow us to offer the next generation of user experiences. Maybe one day I'll see someone using a computer in a movie and won't roll my eyes and sigh quietly in complete disbelief!

Welcome

DMassy — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 23:23:00 GMT

Welcome to my blog.

I work as a Technical Evangelist on Longhorn here at Microsoft specialising in the new presentation subsystem known as Avalon. I plan to post occasionally here about Longhorn and although I can't promise to post daily I will try to do so frequently to update people on current things of interest in Longhorn.

OK so this first post is a little boring as I'm just checking everything works. I'll try and make subsequent posts a little more interesting :-)