Longhorn
Longhorn
The PowerShell team announced that PowerShell will ship with Longhorn Server. (via Mary Jo Foley)
The official Windows Server Roadmap says that Longhorn Server is expected sometime in 2007.
Update: Better Office 12 interface link.
Microsoft has just published the beta version of their Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines (UX Guide). If you are in UI design phase for a new application. It seems prudent to align yourself with the new interface standards. It is also very important to take a very good look at the Office 12 UI, since it usually sets the precedent for User Experience expectations for other applications.
Our team will be going to the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center (EBC) at the end of the month. I think I'v worked up a great program with our ADC and we even secured Rich Turner who gave a great presentation [reg req] at VSLive! Indigo Day on developing Service Oriented applications with today's technology while preparing for Indigo.
Topics we'll cover
- Day One Morning: SOA and Indigo
- Day One Afternoon: Enterprise development with VSTS, MSF and Enterprise Library
- Day Two Morning: .NET 2.0: Smart Clients, ASP.NET 2.0 and VSTO
- Day Two Afternoon: Miscellany: SQL Server 2K5, C# 2.0, and SharePoint Futures
Highlights and Juicy Tidbits:
First Indigo bits will be delivered in a March 2005 CTP. Avalon and Indigo will be released together.
Steve Swartz (has blank blog) said that they settled on using Client/Service terminology rather than Service/Service, or Client/Server
Indigo does a great job of interoperation with WSDL, MSMQ, and COM+, allowing you to migrate one tier at a time. I especially like the easy change for clients. You only need to replace CreateInstance with GetObject and a Moniker that describes the Indigo service. Very nice.
WS-Discovery will not be supported by Indigo. Apparently that will be device support in Longhorn.
There will be Five SKUs for VS Team System. Team Server, Team Architect, Team Developer, Team Test, Team Suite. The Universal License will cover ONE of the user licenses and you can buy Suite “for a small fee”
Versant has jumped into the .NET Object Relational Mapping business with Versant Open Access.NET. Being pretty much cleaned out by the ObjectSpaces vaporware, the market should be ripe for them.
Sybase has release DataWindow.NET, Windows Forms and WebForms control that acts exactly like the PowerBuilder 10 Data Window so PowerBuilder developers will feel at home. PowerBuilder 11 applications can be compiled as .NET applications, even Web Applications. Finally PowerBuilder 12 will be a .NET language, like Delphi.NET is now. I see the future of PowerBuilder and it is .NET!
I especially liked Rich Turner's presentation on how to do SO on .NET today. Good job. I hope to have him present it when we have our EBC in Redmond in May.
Indigo Day was a long one for me. They only have the Exhibition floor open over lunch time. I had to skip lunch yesterday.
In case someone hasn't seen this, here is some holiday satire from Don Box and Chris Anderson.
The associated MSDN TV video shows how to do your own layout panel. Interestingly, Chris introduces the two pass Measure/Arrange layout model in Avalon as a new concept that allows “content negotiation, sized-content ...” Later, he explains that page layout may call Measure multiple times before calling Arrange to discover the optimal layout.
Shows Panel, Measure, MeasureOverride, Arrange, ArrangeOverride, DesiredSize (Can't seem to find proper documentation for ...Override in the beta documentation)
The retooled Avalon bits are available on XP! Desktop developers, meet your future programming environment!
Avalon November 2004 Community Technical Preview
Introduction to "Avalon"
- The "Avalon" Engine.
- The "Avalon" Framework.
- XAML
"Avalon" November Community Technical Preview
Installing "Avalon"
CTP Release Themes
- Support for today's operating systems.
- Layout and control features.
- 3D drawing enhancements.
- Continued refinement.
WinFX SDK
Exploring the New Features
New Elements
- ViewBox.
- TabControl.
- ToggleButton.
Storyboards
Text and Font
Text Animation
3D Enhancements
Data Binding
"Avalon" and Windows Forms Interoperability
What's Missing From This Release?
Conclusion
Mark Russo has an
excellent post on the consequences of the recent Longhorn announcement. I personally see it as very good news, especially with respect to WinFX and Avalon appearing on XP. Now we're talking .NET 3.0. The Longhorn technologies are now in sight for practical use. But on the same token, whither ObjectSpaces and Microsoft Business Framework?
According to Benjamin Mitchell's post from a TechEd Don Box Service Orientation presentation, we don't know when or if SAML will be directly supported:
WS-Security vs. SAML?
There are many different kinds of tokens that may be used, such as Username, X509 certificates and Kerberos tokens. Don said it was unlikely that a token type, like SAML will become the 'single token format to rule them all'. No definite answer on where the SAML support was. As I learnt on Saturday, trying to implement SAML support is a non-trivial exercise - it would be nice if there was a clear statement from Microsoft on when it will be supported in the platform (so that you don't have to share my dll in order for us to use it when we talk). I think it will be part of the identity management work in future.
Michele Leroux Bustamante's very philosophical post on the same talk elucidates the "Saturday" comment: She and Benjamin wrote a sample SAML implementation, So Benjamin ought to know.
Here's his post before the presentation.
Jon Udell is asking the hard questions on why we should move to Avalon:
- Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and Avalon?
- Why should developers prepare for Longhorn/Avalon?
- How much fragmentation can my developers and users tolerate within the Windows platform, never mind across platforms?
- Will I be able to remote the Avalon GUI using Terminal Services and Citrix?
- Is there any way to invest in Avalon without stealing resources from the Web and mobile stuff that I still have to support?
- Then again, why even bother to ask these questions?
[Via Chris Sells]
Dare collects some musings by Jon Udell, Jeremy Mazner, and himself on the advisability of WinFS.
I have two thoughts on this:
- It seems to me that WinFS and the semantic web are trying to solve similar problems and have the same semantics issues.
- The argument to have XML everywhere is hollow because people want to work with objects. SMO on SQL Server 2005 vs WMI on SQL Server 2000 should teach us that.
This ExtremeTech article explains the Castle, a peer-to-peer version of a Network Domain. This is very much in line with their increased API support of Peer-to-Peer, and will ride the wave of home networking. I'm very glad to see this. [Via Adam Kinney]
3D code is included in the latest Avalon release. See the documentation here. [Via Sam Gentile]
Quick Points:
- The 3D coordinate system is different than the 2D (normal)
- To display anything you need to define a Camera, Light, a Model, and a surface, such as BrushMaterial, slap them on a ViewPort3D
If you have the WinHEC build you can have at it!
I've been rooting around the Windows.Forms data-binding. This is the best link I've found on it. Chris Sells's book, Windows Forms Programming in C#, also has a good chapter on it. I'll assume they've fixed the bugs in .NET 2.0 since they're extending the data source picture to include an object data source class.
In the Johnny-come-lately department, I noticed that the MSAvalon namespace is gone from the Longhorn SDK documentation and replaced with System.Windows. Very nice. Given that Windows.Forms data-binding is less than shiny, I wanted to see what direction Avalon was taking. Take a look at the System.Windows.Data namespace. They even have some User Guide text written!
The Register reports that the-technology-formally-known-as-Palladium, NGSCB, is not scheduled to be released with Longhorn, supposedly due to Managed API problems. It's important to note, however that the hardware side of the picture, TCPA, is moving forward.
Read the article. (The Microsoft Watch article)
Rob Relyea (MS Avalon team) compares XAML to html+css in response to a DevX column. He covers:
- inline formatting
- style sheets
- style and property inheritance (supported even in Windows Forms)
The column, by Nigel McFarlane, is much more comprehensive, covering about 100 XAML tags and comparing them to XHTML, XUL and SVG. Very interesting read.
Chris Sells tries to say that Avalon is not intended to replace the browser. Well, I'm sure there are some niches where Thin Clients would be better than Smart Clients with ClickOnce and InfoPath but most of them are not commercial. Somehow I think Microsoft would not be at all dismayed by the demise of Thin Client applications.
Here's an excellent example of the richness of the XAML and the underlying Avalon classes. Joe Marini, a PM at Microsoft, shows us how to write a blog reader with 56 lines of pure markup. [Via Chris Sells].
Chris Anderson explains the core rendering engine in Avalon, called MIL for Media Integration Layer. Read it and Know. And you thought he just milled wood!
Like Barbie without Ken, the Indigo team has divorced the MessageBus architecture from IIS. This was alluded to in the .NET Show
episode on Indigo. Don Box makes it quite plain
here.
Christian Weyer introduces
WebHost, the new service host process for Indigo services. This is important for both architects, developers and infrastructure folks.