The Acropolis Leaks

No, not the one in Greece.

Microsoft announced (actually, it leaked) the creation of a new project in the Visual Studio/.NET team codenamed "Acropolis". The technology will subsume the Composite UI App Block and Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF) from the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group. It will not be based wholly on the CAB/SCSF bits, but it will use a lot of the underlying concepts such as Object Builder, Events, View/Presenter, etc. The timeframe of release of Acropolis is when Orcas is released in 2008 sometime.

The other news on this front, is that R2 of SCSF will be the last release of SCSF from P&P. With the creation of Acropolis, there is no need to further the development of SCSF and Acropolis will subsume it. However, the P&P team has promised (and is busy working on) a migration guidance package from SCSF/CAB to Acropolis for those teams that built applications around SCSF.

Is this good ?

Yes, I think so but we'll have to see how Acropolis develops. CAB/SCSF was built using best practices that the P&P team discovered as they talked with clients and company's building a range of internal and external applications. However, they focused on the bits themselves and the architecture of the framework. It wasn't until the end where they began focusing on better VS.NET integration, tool support, etc to make it easier to learn and use. Acropolis is spending a huge amount of effort to make this easier by providing designers and rich tool support to make a lot of the wiring up of Views and Presenters happen without writing a line of code.

Obviously this broadens the appeal of the framework to more developers particularly those focused on RAD development. It will also generate support for WPF and XAML to make it easier for developers targeting that technology. The biggest advantage for teams that worked with CAB/SCSF is that the technology, although changing, will now be fully supported by the .NET framework team.

As a small team, it's unrealistic to assume that the P&P group can expend the time and effort to ever make technology that they come up with as rich and full featured particularly in the area of tool support as the whole .NET team. However, the P&P team has been to accomplish what I consider to be a core function - find, nurture and disseminate best practice architectures and designs into the .NET community. CAB/SCSF was an area where they moved way beyond creating whitepapers and other forms of communication into actual software bits that captured those best practices in the form that teams could put to use right away.

We have an application that just shipped last fall based on CAB/SCSF R1. We're now looking to upgrade it to R2 and we eagerly away the day that Acropolis arrives. Evolving technology is never a bad thing if it's done well. I've learned over time that most developer technology has a short shelf-life before sometime new and better comes along.

Posted by Mark M. Baker at 03:48 PM  Permalink