Vista from a developer’s point of view

To me Windows Vista marks a great new milestone for software developers. Not just because Microsoft invested years of development into a new programming framework, but because that framework will be included out of the box. Until now, if you wanted to take advantage of the power of the .Net Framework (1.0, 1.1 and 2.0) you had to either include the installer for the framework or create some other magic to get it on the user’s system (asking the user to please, please download and install it first?)

With Vista, not only do you get the .Net Framework 2.0 (much improved over the previous versions) in the box, but also the amazingly powerful Windows Presentation Foundation (which is what I’ve worked with), Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation (two pieces I know nothing about yet).

This will lower the barrier to entry for applications developed using these powerful tools to zero. As long as you’re writing your application for Vista you can be sure the basic requirements are there.

There will be issues with certain features of WPF (rendering in software vs. hardware, especially for 3D), but the framework helps you detect these issues and makes it possible to adapt your application to lower its “flashyness” (RenderCapability.Tier, remember this needs to be shifted down by 16 bits if you want to use 0, 1 and 2 as the human readable values).

To me Windows Presentation Foundation is the most important technology to come out of Microsoft for a long time. I’ve never written too much actual Win32 or even MFC/ATL UI code for client applications, but I’ve done a lot of HTML / CSS stuff and pure business object stuff (COM/ATL). More about that in my next post. I don’t want this to get too long.

 

2 Comments

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