September 12, 2005
Lots of Project Buzz at PDC 2005Shannon Cochran
Hot topics this week at Microsoft Professional Developers Conference will include AJAX, Acrylic, and Sparkle. Will PDC be dessert topping or floor wax? Either way Dr. Dobb's PDC Show Daily will provide the rundown.
Attendees at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this week in Los Angeles will be eager for insight into upcoming Windows Vista components such as the Windows Presentation Framework (formerly Avalon) and the Windows Communications Foundation (code named Indigo)--as well as for details of next-generation technologies that at present are only rumors.
"There's two new technologies that we're very curious about," said Paul Colton, founder and CEO of Xamlon, which will be exhibiting its Xamlon Web development platform at the show. "One is Sparkle." Sparkle is expected to be one element of Expression Studio, a suite of developer-oriented graphics tools that may compete with the Adobe/Macromedia product suite.
"Since we don't know what it is, it's probably too early to call it the Flash killer," Colton cautions. But it's widely presumed that Sparkle, along with the recently previewed Acrylic graphic design tool, will offer programmatic access to the Windows Vista presentation layer through the XAML markup language. The tools will likely integrate with other Microsoft products such as Visual Studio and Office.
Another technology that's gathering buzz is Atlas, a framework for AJAX-style web development. Microsoft's Scott Guthrie announced the project on his blog: "What we've set out to do is to make it dramatically easier for anyone to build AJAX-style web applications that deliver rich, interactive, and personalized experiences. Developers should be able to build these applications without great expertise in client scripting; they should be able to integrate their browser UI seamlessly with the rest of their applications; and they should be able to develop and debug these applications with ease." Guthrie indicated that a developer preview release of Atlas would be available at PDC.
"It's a little bit of a departure," notes Colton, "because AJAX is about going off Windows onto the Web." He sees this as an important trend: "Our technology is not hardwired to a platform. We're more about developing in one place and deploying in another."
The Mono developers would be certain to agree with that sentiment. Though the effort to create an open-source .NET implementation has been running more quietly since the initial surge of hype faded away, the Mono developers have significant progress to report. The Mono users gathering at PDC will showcase Ruby.NET and PHP.NET compilers; a new ASP.NET editor; a .NET bug finder; and the Mono project's XAML compiler, among other tools.
Bill Gates' opening keynote from the conference will be webcast at http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx.
|
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
