From ActiveWin: Adam Kinney, a known blogger in the Avalon community, tells us of his experiences getting started with Longhorn, and what’s working and what’s not. Elsewhere, Joe Beda, development lead on the Avalon/Longhorn team, talks about the 3D capabilities that will be delivered in Longhorn.
Chronicles of a WinFx Developer: Just Getting Started
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I love .NET and am really looking forward to all of the technological goodies in Longhorn. In my opinion you can’t have enough managed code, and everywhere we’ve used it at work it has made a marvelous improvement.
Now for a very brief rant, only mildly off-topic, which you can ignore if you wish. This rant is entirely a matter of opinion.
— BEGIN RANT —
Microsoft has obviously made some great improvements in Longhorn relating to the user interface. The improvements are at the development level, e.g., XAML, and at the display level, e.g., Avalon.
What they haven’t improved is how the UI functions. Essentially what they’ve done is put a very nice shade of lipstick on a pig. It’s still too “busy” in my opinion.
The individual elements of the UI look good, but there are too many of them. In an earlier OSNews article, which I couldn’t find, a developer who’d defected from Apple to Microsoft said that there was some excellent UI work done at Microsoft, but that the resultant improvements tended to get lost in the noise. Exactly!
I wish Microsoft would take this opportunity to trim some of the fat off the pig and make it more streamlined and elegant.
And yes, at home I use OS X.
— END RANT —
in what way do they have good UI work and in what way is their UI to busy?
I am interested because I don’t think either are that good or that bad and would like some specifics so I an understand what you are talking about.
My question is, how long until the OSS community completely rips all this off for Linux, then criticizes the company who came up with the ideas? You know, how they ripped off the start menu, taskbar, similar print dialogs, integrated filesystem/net browser, etc. yet claim to hate “M$.”
My question is, how long until the OSS community completely rips all this off for Linux, then criticizes the company who came up with the ideas? You know, how they ripped off the start menu, taskbar, similar print dialogs, integrated filesystem/net browser, etc. yet claim to hate “M$.”
Just as MS ripped off Apple, who ripped off Xerox Parc, blah, blah, blah…
There’s a difference between disliking Microsoft’s practices, and a user interface. I for one will *never ever* claim that the UI for Windows is bad.
But I think you’re to simple minded to understand that. That’s OK though.
You know, how they ripped off the start menu, taskbar, similar print
dialogs, integrated filesystem/net browser, etc. yet claim to hate “M$.”
You know, the OSS community is not one person. That’s like saying “How come afro-americans want to be treated just like everyone else, yet they say that they hate white people”.
Just because someone in the community thinks one thing doesn’t mean that everyone does. You should bring up one specific persons opinions if you want to prove contradictions.
Btw, the integrated browser would have been there without MS doing it. It’s a natural step to try in the process of making a modular filebrowser/fileviewer. That said, I still think it’s a bad idea. Most windows-users I know launches Internet Explorer when they want to surf the web and Explorer when they want to manage files.
So my entire development budget gets burned on learning new technologies to make things easier, yet end up making things more difficult and cost more…
Fantastic. Time to start up my own consultancy specialising in mod_perl / postgres based apps.
My question is, how long until the OSS community completely rips all this off for Linux
They are already hard at work on it. It might even get released before Longhorn, if the Longhorn delays turn out to be real.
then criticizes the company who came up with the ideas?
Microsoft didn’t come up with any of these ideas.
1) Avalon = DisplayPS, only hardware accelerated. Postscript isn’t new, hardware acceleration isn’t new, and hardware acceleration of postscript isn’t new. What is innovative about Avalon again?
2) XAML = Mozilla XUL, and before that NeWS. The nifty thing about NeWS is that it used a turning-complete language to specify the UI (Postscript). XAML allows you to embed C# code into XML, to get around the inherent suckiness of XML. Yuck!
3) C# = Java + tiny bits of Lisp. It’ll be another decade or two before C# is as good a GUI development language as Smalltalk was in the 1980s.
4) Sidebar? *cough* NeXTStep.
5) WinFS: Databases are not new. Database filesystems are not new (old BeFS). What’s new about WinFS again?
then criticizes the company who came up with the ideas?
You know what bugs me? People who know so little about computer history that they think that Microsoft is the company that came up with these ideas. There is nothing significant that is new in Longhorn. Get over it. Microsoft is not innovative — the best they can hope to be called is a good integrator of existing ideas.
You know, how they ripped off the start menu, taskbar,
Sorry, NeXTStep! Jobs and crew are creative fellows, a’int they?
similar print dialogs,
Oh, can WinXP print to PDF or e-mail now? Is it a hidde option, I can’t seem to find it?
integrated filesystem/net browser
Konqueror isn’t an integrated filesystem/net browser. Its a generic KPart container for viewing all sorts of documents. HTML pages just happen to be more documents in the KIO filesystem. If anything, it is a rip-off of Apple’s OpenDoc.
My question is, how long until the OSS community completely rips all this off for Linux
They are already hard at work on it. It might even get released before Longhorn, if the Longhorn delays turn out to be real.
then criticizes the company who came up with the ideas?
Microsoft didn’t come up with any of these ideas.
1) Avalon = DisplayPS, only hardware accelerated. Postscript isn’t new, hardware acceleration isn’t new, and hardware acceleration of postscript isn’t new. What is innovative about Avalon again?
2) XAML = Mozilla XUL, and before that NeWS. The nifty thing about NeWS is that it used a turning-complete language to specify the UI (Postscript). XAML allows you to embed C# code into XML, to get around the inherent suckiness of XML. Yuck!
3) C# = Java + tiny bits of Lisp. It’ll be another decade or two before C# is as good a GUI development language as Smalltalk was in the 1980s.
4) Sidebar? *cough* NeXTStep.
5) WinFS: Databases are not new. Database filesystems are not new (old BeFS). What’s new about WinFS again?
then criticizes the company who came up with the ideas?
You know what bugs me? People who know so little about computer history that they think that Microsoft is the company that came up with these ideas. There is nothing significant that is new in Longhorn. Get over it. Microsoft is not innovative — the best they can hope to be called is a good integrator of existing ideas.
You know, how they ripped off the start menu, taskbar,
Sorry, NeXTStep! Jobs and crew are creative fellows, a’int they?
similar print dialogs,
Oh, can WinXP print to PDF or e-mail now? Is it a hidde option, I can’t seem to find it?
integrated filesystem/net browser
Konqueror isn’t an integrated filesystem/net browser. Its a generic KPart container for viewing all sorts of documents. HTML pages just happen to be more documents in the KIO filesystem. If anything, it is a rip-off of Apple’s OpenDoc.
Microsoft is not innovative — the best they can hope to be called is a good integrator of existing ideas.
This is half of what computer science is. I’d hope you of all people would know this. Let’s read this paper, and this other paper. What if we combine that idea with this idea? Sure there are new ideas coming out, but for every new idea there are a ton of papers that basically apply/combine different ideas in new ways.
Avalon = DisplayPS, only hardware accelerated
Yeah, Next have had something like this, but I’ve no doubt that this has A) a number of incremental improvements and B) a modern usefull implmentation that will fill a void. Next is not exactly usable by the vast majority of people these days.
XAML = Mozilla XUL, and before that NeWS
I don’t know much about this, but the fact that there was a recent rant by the Mozilla people about needing to combine XUL with some GNOME components or something to combate this suggests that perhaps XAML is another incremental improvement over existing solutions. This is call progress.
C# = Java + tiny bits of Lisp. It’ll be another decade or two before C# is as good a GUI development language as Smalltalk was in the 1980s.
I think you really misunderstand the .NET architecture considering you didn’t even mention the CLI. At any rate, C# is much more than just a GUI development language, just as Java is. This is a VERY usefull incremental improvment and I for one will be happy to have such a language to use in the future (via mono, I use unix).
Sidebar? *cough* NeXTStep
Sidebar = fluff.
WinFS: Databases are not new. Database filesystems are not new (old BeFS). What’s new about WinFS again?
What’s new? as I understand it WinFS is planning on USING those database features much more than BeFS did. Again, depending on what turns up this *could* be very interesting.
Honestly Rayiner, you usually have quite insightfull comments, but this is not one of them. Innovation or not, these things in Longhorn are interesting and cool. Having them all in one OS will definatly be something to check out.
This is half of what computer science is. I’d hope you of all people would know this.
You have to read my comment in the context of the original poster. I’m not criticising Microsoft for not making ground-breaking innovations in Longhorn. I’m pointing out that none of this stuff is really original, so its stupid to ask, as the original poster did, how long it will be before open-source developers rip-off these “Microsoft innovations.”
Innovation or not, these things in Longhorn are interesting and cool. Having them all in one OS will definatly be something to check out.
I don’t disagree that these things are cool/interesting/nifty. I’m happy that Microsoft is recognizing good ideas and running with them. However, claiming that these ideas are cool, progressive, interesting, is something else entirely from claiming that they are innovative. The whole “Open source does not innovate” claim is totally pointless, because nobody does. Everything happens incrementally. Longhorn is a perfect example of that. Thus, accusing OSS developers of “ripping off Microsoft” is completely wrongheaded.