Does IE7 heart .NET ?
It's all very nice, with the channel 9 video and blog entry, using RSS as a standard method to do polymorphic vector persistence is a nice touch. Here are some observations on the video:
First off, before everyone gets excited about 'RSS for the masses' and using a subscription model will be the 'new standard way of browsing the web'. It's worth thinking back to around 1996 when IE and Netscape were rushing the 'push' model to the market. Back then it was called 'channel subscriptions' but it never really caught on. I think this will be more successful, but it's worth keeping in mind why the 'channel push' didn't work last time round for the average user. I blame lack of adoption, on demand connections and a general bad implemention on the user interface.
The team kept mentioning that the 'glue applications' that they used to pull together these feeds were all written in C#. I think we can assume that this RSSimplement ion toolkit is going to be a .NET assembly. I won't be the only one hoping that this means that IE7 will *depend* on .NET 2.0. This will make the download huge of course, but it makes perfect sense to pay this price now and make the download for WinFX runtime in the future less than 100MB.
If you think about it, IE7 is the perfect deployment vehicle. For the tech savvy, with broadband connections, the large download will not be a problem. For the general public, who really don't care which version of IE they have, will get their version through the mail from their ISP or on a cover disk on a magazine.
For the .NET world the lack of installed base is a big issue. With users taking a long time to upgrade their OS, Longhorn is too far out. Given that Avalon and Indigo are based on the same runtime as Whidbey, which is being released in November, it makes a lot of sense to get this version on as many desktops as possible.