Avalon/XAML First Look

Thursday, Apr. 14 2005 | Author: Scrivs

Dave Shea has a first look at the upcoming Avalon/XAML technologies from Microsoft. From a technology perspective there really is nothing new to see here, but Dave gives some great insight at the end of the article that should have us all a bit worried:

The past couple of years of IE security problems have raised a lot of awareness about browser lock-in, and the problems that tying your application into a specific browser/operating system can later cause. Like ActiveX, in-browser XAML/Avalon appears to be a method of continuing that trend. Something tells me we wont be seeing an Avalon player for Linux any time soon.

I’d be a whole lot more comfortable with XAML if it were strictly meant as a Windows OS rendering language. Proprietary markup on a proprietary platform is nothing to get worked up over. But the obvious web cross-over leads me to hope we’re not going to see a whole new generation of browser/OS-specific web apps. I wonder if Microsoft might be hoping for something different.

Reading the comments I was hoping to find someone say how wrong Dave is on these points, but there wasn’t any disagreement from the audience. Everyone has agreed. Does anyone in the audience here know if Dave hits the nail on the head, or is he just a bit off-base?

Closest thing I see is:

XAML isn’t for the web. Its for designing windows applications that run on the Avalon technology. It is true that one can connect your application to the web using a technology such as Indigo but it is in no way a markup language for web browsers.

But this will not stop people from trying to create web apps with it I am sure. Also what happens in the corporate world when the IT department begins to create Avalon apps that must be run in the browser (IE)? Do you think someone is going to close IE just to open Firefox over and over again to browse the web? I would like to think so, but I am guessing the answer is no.

Share and Enjoy

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7 Responses for "Avalon/XAML First Look"

Griffith

April 14th, 2005 at 6:48 pm
1

Microsoft’s technologies are less and less sought out, and this will probably start as something cute but will later be used to spawn a new order of adds or trojans.

If Microsoft doesn’t start letting go of their platform dependant applications they will drown eventually. I wouldn’t be surprised if in ten years we’d all be using Google OS, Linux and Mac. Even Bill Gates said that he expect the company to break apart in that time-span a few months ago.
Ben Askins

April 14th, 2005 at 7:59 pm
2

The response “XAML isn’t for the web” is an argument over semantics. I could say that HTML isn’t for the web, it’s a markup language for declaratively defining a user interfaces. Of course you can point your web browser to a URL serving up some HTML over the internet and voila, you have a web page. The same goes for XAML, it’s a mark up language for declaratively defining a user interface. Of course it’s going to be used to serve up UI over the web and is a potential HTML killer. I don’t think it will be though. There’s seems to be a trend in the industry to embrace open standards… or maybe that’s just my wishful thinking. XAML seems to be an evolution of thinking from HTML, through XHTML, a dash of XUL etc. If it is the next logical evolution then I hope it’s sucessful, but I hope as well that it is embraced in an open way and Microsoft wise up to the open approach.
minghong

April 15th, 2005 at 12:10 am
3

I have to agree with them. XAML is not intended to be used on the fly. There is no “rendering engine” for it (unlike XUL). Unless it is used as an ActiveX object (which we don’t use anyway :-P), there is no way to use it on the web.
asqui

April 18th, 2005 at 9:13 am
4

“what happens in the corporate world when the IT department begins to create Avalon apps that must be run in the browser (IE)? Do you think someone is going to close IE just to open Firefox over and over again to browse the web? I would like to think so, but I am guessing the answer is no.”

The intranet sites at work, served up by SAP (I assume), are already IE specific and seldom work in Firefox.

Furthermore, corporate policy is that all software must be packaged for the internal software deployment system — this means that everything is installed in a standard location, everyone’s machine is in a predictable state, and you can make sure that things don’t interfere with eachother. From the viewpoint of a helpdesk with thousands of machines to support, this makes sense. I don’t know how other companies do it.

Unfortunately there are no Mozilla or Firefox packages (and if there were, they’d be way out of date). Presumably there’s no strong case for deploying and supporting other browsers given that IE is already available.

I use Firefox for most browsing, and IE for the intranet, but I don’t think regular users would even be able to install Firefox as they wouldn’t have Admin privlidges on their local machine.

So you see, in the corporate playing field this is already a moot point, in some cases.
Avalon real estate

August 24th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
5

Maybe that will be interesting
Scott Holodak

September 14th, 2005 at 1:36 pm
6

It seems possible that XAML could be converted to XHTML/CSS/JS using XML stylesheets… I could see MS adding support for this to IIS via an ISAPI extension or to the .NET Framework. I hope MS has learned by now that resisting open standards w/respect to developers is going to hurt them. Look at how many people are leaving behind IE for Firefox. I wonder how many web developers out there are still using IE as their primary development browser…
sports

March 31st, 2006 at 3:33 am
7

sports Keyword doesn’t matter