John Montgomery wrote up an article on his MSDN Weblog about Microsofta??s roadmap for client UI development ...
I’m sure he didn’t mean it this way, but to me it basically reads like this: Forget about Windows Forms 2.0 because we won’t get enough adoption of the 2.0 .NET framework between it’s release and the release of Avalon. While you wait to see if Avalon will ever actually be delivered, and then wait for it to take off, and then wait for an acceptable majority of your customer base to upgrade their hardware and software enough to run it (it requires Windows XP and later, plus DirectX) ... just use Windows Forms as it currently exists in the .NET Framework 1.1. Oh, and unless your app will be delivered over the web, don’t even bother thinking about this Avalon technology at this point.
Actually, the article claims that “Windows Forms v2.0 … is the best way today to create client applications using the .NET Framework.” Since the 2.0 framework isn’t available to consumers, and we don’t have any dates for when it might become available … I simply ignored the preposterous suggestion that it’s the best choice today and looked at his roadmap, which ironically fails to even mention the 2.0 version of Windows Forms, being focused primarily on when Avalon might released (probably before the end of 2006) and what it might be good for (really complex websites or applications with graphically intense data-visualization requirements).
Ah well. I’m putting Avalon out of my mind for now. The one really useful bit of advice in the article is the suggestion that with all this uncertainty, you’d really be doing yourself a favor to adopt as strict a separation of form and function as possible — the 2.0 compiler that ships with Visual Studio 2005 makes that much easier, with it’s partial classes, but again … who knows when enough end users will be upgraded to that to make it actually usable, since the compiler can’t target the 1.1 version of the framework (stupid).
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I am not sure why Microsoft has chose to couple the .NET framework so tightly to the IDE. I don’t see why I can’t use Visual Studio 2003 with the 2.0 framework? Visual Studio also has a terribly slow lifecycle. Why not a shorter release cycle? 2 years is ridiculously slow….
Yeah, if they don’t make it possible (easy) to target the 1.1 version of the Framework with VS 2003, I’m not sure how well it’s going to go over around my office. Actually, I am sure: we won’t be allowed to use it (for a while), because things like new versions of .NET have to be tested with all the OTHER applications to make sure they don’t break anything, so they take forever to roll out.
As far as the “slow lifecycle,” I can’t really agree with you there, VS 2002, VS 2003, VS 2005 … a year or two between major releases of an IDE doesn’t seem like much, especially when you consider how different they are, I don’t think you could get adoption of a new IDE much faster than that. I mean, don’t forget they have to sell this stuff [
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