Avalon not shipping with Longhorn??

Just watched interview with Chris Anderson (Avalon Architect) over on http://www.theserverside.net/, very good, if you haven’t seen it I suggest you take a look.

At the start of the interview Chris is reluctant to say when Avalon will ship and even if it’ll ship with longhorn.

Extract…

TSS - And that is scheduled to ship as part of Longhorn right?
CA - That's scheduled to ship simultaneously with Longhorn and I believe right now the plan is for it to be on the disc with Longhorn.

TSS - So it is not something that would come as part of the OS?
CA - There is still debate as to what it exactly is. We actually just, I honestly don't know the answers to how they are going to end up with that. I do not even have to lie about it, its great. I really don't know.

End Extract

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One of the problems ISV’s face at the moment is shipping the .net runtime. I know MS say millions of desktops have downloaded it from windows update but this is no guarantee. IMHO I think it was a mistake not shipping the .net runtime with XP SP2. 

If MS seriously wants ISV’s like Amazon to create smart “Avalon” clients then the Avalon runtime (WinFx) needs to ship out the box with longhorn.

Imagine going to Amazon in the longhorn world. Theirs a world of difference between

1. Click here for “Amazon Smart Client”, requires longhorn
2. Download / install Avalon runtime (20 MB runtime?), then click here…

My take on this is that Avalon requires certain level of 3D acceleration to work, but it's supposed to fall back to software rendering if the required hardware's not there. Performance for the fall-back must be sucking. Therefore, when installing, LH will sense this & recommend you install the WinXP UI instead. So, it's a checkbox type of thing. The majority of machines in 2006 will have Avalon enabled.

It kind of sucks now that when I bring up .Net coding to older coders, they balk at the 24Meg download of .Net itself.  I think that MS may have done itself a disservice by making .Net an option. 

Future coders (in the distant year 2006) will have to either limit the functionality or write it such that it will work in all cases.  I've found that having to write it so that it works in all cases makes me want to write it in the lowest common denominator.  Why write it twice. 

Edit:  And my point was that the same will be done for avalon.

Probably I am confusing the two, but the point still stands

As long as .Net 1.1 or higher is shipped w.Longhorn I'm happy.

I think you might be confusing Aero and Avalon. Aero is the longhorn UI. Avalon is a new presentation stack. MS originally said Aero will be built using Avalon technology, however I find this difficult to believe now.

 

If it’s “under debate” as to how Avalon will ship, the LH UI (Aero) can’t be built using Avalon because worst case scenario Avalon won’t be there.

 

That’s not to say that Aero / LH won’t use Direct-X and hardware acceleration as you stated.

 

Pure speculation obviously.

dbates wrote:

If MS seriously wants ISV’s like Amazon to create smart “Avalon” clients then the Avalon runtime (WinFx) needs to ship out the box with longhorn.

I believe the quote indicated not just "out of the same box" but "On the same disk"

A previous post (on another thread) indicated that Longhorn had gone "Back to the drawing board."

My guess is that there is discussion about segmenting the product for any number of reasons.  (Like we're offering parts of LH for win XP, if we call it longhorn, will it confuse people.)

My read on the interview was that it was an offhand comment indicating uncertianty about the final packaging than a significant announcment of an architecural change of the maqgnitude of ripping avalon out of Longhorn.  The fact that the question generated no follow up seems to support that assertion.