Joe Beda - How should developers prepare for Longhorn/Avalon?

I'd like to expand on WinForms a little more.  After we did this interview, there were a round of posts in the blog-o-sphere around the longevity of WinForms.

ChrisAn responds to Scoble's post.  Chris Sells also has some things to say on similar topics.

In the interview, I say that Avalon is going to supplant WinForms.  However, I didn't say (and I should have) that this won't be happening for a while.  WinForms is a great technology that makes a lot of sense in a lot of situations -- whether you take Avalon into account or not.

About power on the desktop and net aware rich applications, I am extremely excited over the prospects that this paradigm brings to the table for application development. We have been using .Net applications leveraging encrypted webservices as a communication medium for a short time with great results. Even over a lowly modem we have been able to get acceptable kinds of response times that are only more so with a real connections ie. broadband. All the while, having a user experiance that does not leave the user wanting. In the upcoming longhorn having this kind of powertool become even more effective adds to my anticipation.

Lwatson wrote:

About power on the desktop and net aware rich applications, I am extremely excited over the prospects that this paradigm brings to the table for application development.

I'm glad to hear this!  These are exactly the scenarios that we are working hard to hit with Avalon and Longhorn in general.

All this Longhorn stuff made me to get the Client Preview off of MSDN this weekend. One thing that struck me was the speed at which it installs even in an emulated environment like VMware 4.51. Hell it installed to the driver detection phase in 21 minutes from the ISO image. While I am used to seeing Linux do that sort of thing. The Last windows I ever saw install that fast was never....

It seems responsive though in the client preview the interface appears to be ready long before it actually is ready to take user input. That is perhaps the environments doing so I reserve judgement till I get it happening on real hardware.

The couple of .Net things I had availabe to me there seems to work without a hitch. Look forward to gleening some Longhorn specific stuff from the web and playing with it.

Hi Joe,

interesting videos. After hearing your comment about how to prepare for Avalon it made me think about Visual Studio and way in which people develop applications. If you are a good developer you know that you should layer your application, however, Visual Studio uses the "old Visual Basic" approach to rich client development. In other words, you create a windows form application. What does Visual Studio do, it creates a main function in the form you create first. Already that means the form is doing more than presentation. Potentially people will also write application initialisation code in this function. Ok I add a button to the form and click on it and the idea opens up the associated event routines. So far I could be writing all my business logic etc within the form.

Of course no one would do this ??? Well, how many prototypes that become production systems are written this way, it is seductive to less skilled developers.

Wouldn't it better if the tools tried to lead people to develop applications using a layed approach. It would certainly help with migration later on to Avalon.

Martin Spedding