Daniel Lehenbauer - Demo of Avalon 3D

Avalon 3D looks cool, but like games developers, you all want to work on the engine and noone wants to work on the supporting tools. I'm amazed to hear that there isn't even an importer strategy yet. That's like 5% of the work you've got to do before people will use this. Where's the 3D equivalent of the windows forms designer? I know some people love XML and sure, it's quicker to write XAML than write the code that the XAML compiler generates, but most people's eyes glaze over at an editor screen full of XML.

OK, short of licencing something from Autodesk, Microsoft isn't going to come up with a 3D editor for Avalon 3D developers, but I've yet to see a visual designer for 2D XAML forms. In fact I've yet to see anyone type XAML code in an editor that provides help with tag and attribute names. Now I see why Microsoft keeps delaying all these products - the demos all look cool, but there's so much more work to be done before they're useful. Meanwhile all the talk about XAML and Avalon puts people off developing Windows Forms code.

by the way, the "you can do X in just Y lines of code" is a demo gambit I keep hearing and it's really not that impressive to the seasoned developer. Like the guy in the Mac film saying "you can build a web browser in 6 lines of code" or the Whidbey forms demo guy saying how you could build an Outlook clone in 20 lines or whatever that was. All these claims show is that you have a component available that implements some large chunk of functionality and it has a sane interface. Go over to ComponentSource.com and see all the hundreds of components you can buy there that do sophisticated things without you having to write any lines of code. If I go and buy a Quake licence from Id software I can "write" Quake 3 in 10 lines of  C code, but that doesn't mean that C is a wonderfully productive language for writing 3D games.

Do you see what I'm getting at here? It's vital that the development environment supports component useage and it's nice if the environment includes some powerful components on top of the usual buttons and list boxes, but the presence of those components only makes the user instantly productive at one thing - the thing the components were designed for. For example, those Whidbey components might let you put together an Outlook line interface in 20 lines, but what if you now want to write a travel reservations app? Those components help you little if at all - you're back to writing thousands of lines of code.