langreiter.com plain, simple: 2003-10-28-pdcInsanity

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2003-10-28-pdcInsanity

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 7679 days AGO

Chris Hollander: "When I see Longhorn, I see tons of code that i've written in the past become obselete. I'll never write navigation code in ASP.NET again. I'll never write remoting code again. I don't have to write anywhere near as much searching, sorting, filtering, and grouping code anymore. I will store my data dramatically differently now, with much less work. I'll never write code that displays a list (any kind of list ...) anymore. With all this in mind, exactly what kind of code will I write now?"

Tim Sneath: "Avalon is designed to support future technologies such as HighDPI, 16:9 and sCRGB. Windows are automatically composited to a background buffer, to which effects such as shading and alpha blends can be applied. The co-ordinate system operates using virtual pixels, as if every display was 96dpi. Applications can then be automatically scaled to match the actual dpi. Everything goes through the Direct3D pipeline. [...] Avalon allows you to create design surfaces with little effort - with the addition of a single XAML element, your application can allow its users to move controls around the screen. This is like the difference between the design and run-time views in Visual Studio - both are now supported by Avalon natively, where only run-time capabilities were natively supported in Win32. This feature should be a major boon to reporting applications and the like."

"One clever feature is that the SDK installs an Avalon printer driver into Longhorn that can be used to generate these documents. So, for example, if you printed a Powerpoint slide deck with the printer driver, it would generate a XAML document that could be rendered as part of a form."

Wesner Moise: "Just to give you another sense of the magnitude and versatility of this library, the textbox control is a superset of the HTML and RichText control that WIN32 provide. The textbox is essentially Word, with advanced features like page layout, footnotes, columns, wrapping around objects, background spelling. The beauty is that you can customize the textbox control at a much lower level with WIN32 controls; you can actually add custom properties to text ranges and modify the rendering behavior of text. The level of control and customization is unprecedented; writing a wordprocessor was never this easy. The Shell exposes a number of namespaces and classes, seeming to promise to make shell extensions as trivial as implementing a derived class, and making application interoperability with the explorer much more intimate."