Discussions

@Sven Groot:

You nailed it.

Sounds like Sinofsky as next CEO is now a dead certainty, at least if Win8 is judged a success. That is probably why he left; once you're a division president there's no other way to move up, after all.

@felix9: or all of the above + HTML5

native library shims are great, because you can wrap them with the higher-level abstraction of your choice and are not limited to a single language/framework/whatever. I hope this and Google's Native Client catch on, we could even port Silverlight/Moonlight to it!

I should be stoned for encouraging raymond's spam, but this is actually a pretty good documentary. stopped clock and all that.

2 days ago, felix9 wrote

or, crazier, WPF have many concepts that not 'native' to the runtime and languages, we have to use complex API to access them, can we build a DSL that use them natually ? like declare and access Dependency Property or Attached Property like native ones ? access Routed Event ? access or write Binding Expressions ? walk through the Layout Tree ? interleaving XAML ? like Razor ???

great idea. actually, I guess XAML was supposed to be a DSL itself, it's just trapped within cumbersome XML syntax ...

@vesuvius:

IMO, we don't need any more gargantuan frameworks like WPF or WCF - which I do like but I think within them there's "a much smaller and cleaner" programming model "struggling to get out". We do need more features like LINQ, dynamic support, or async that help simplify, unify, bring order to the other stuff that's already there. 

About the UI - the new extensions system kinda brings the limitations of the current UI model to the fore. A lot of the extensions I like (by themselves) add things to the context menu that are individually useful, but taken together they bloat the context menu to the point where it's unusable. I think there's a question of whether the UI structure scales well enough to handle all the capabilities the program now has, and maybe they should consider a rethink similar to what the Office team did that resulted in the Ribbon (which is not to say that they should copy the ribbon itself!) Although the VS2010 Productivity Power Tools are a good start for a UI rethink (if only they wouldn't crash the IDE all the time ...)

IIRC Mono-on-PNaCl has already been made to work, at least for some prototypy definition of "work". I saw it discussed on the PNaCl dev mailing list.

imo there's a difference between good-faith attempts to engage with a community on some topic (whether it's about politics or anything else) and just spamming a forum with your fixations. I say that as someone who is concerned about the WL crackdown as well.

Really interested in this Native Client stuff, hope it opens the door to more client language/runtime innovation.