According to istartedsomething.com, we have:
- Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) - A managed UI platform. Bloated, slow. We spent a bunch of time in 2006 trying to reduce the working set and startup time.
- Silverlight - A rewrite of WPF in unmanaged code; small, fast, excellently written. But probably too little, too late to make WPF and XAML relevant to the internet.
- Windows Forms - A workhorse: a bunch of enterprise apps run on this .Net 1.0 and 2.0 technology.
- Win32 - The oldest one. Ancient technology. And no developer wants to work with this.
- Media Center Markup Language - Written by the MC team; flashy. But it doesn't do a lot - just enough to draw the MC UI. You can't use it as a UI platform for all of Windows.
This means that we have 6 teams that work on the same thing - a bit of code that draws the user interface for applications on the screen.
If we were a sane company, we would have the following (from oldest to newest):
Win32 (the oldest one)
Windows Forms (the replacement, to make programming UI better)
(A flashy and fast) unmanaged WPF for Silverlight and Media Center
11 comments:
so you think that wpf won't be optimized perf wise and get better feature wise in the future?
will 7 finally be on par with os x in terms of ui effects quality? is directUI able to do that? since vista delivers only the fancy stuff (like glass, composition, ...) with the DWM which uses parts of WPF (the unmanaged components, milcore.dll).
I'm sure that the WPF stack will be optimized, perf-wise. I'll bet anything (well...my MSFT stock options) that it will be unmanaged in the future.
Wait! It is! See Silverlight - light, small, fast. Microsoft ended up writing a WPF stack twice - which is expensive, and pointless - we should have released something much better the first time round, imo.
WPF can do anything that the Mac technologies can; they are pretty similar.
yes, wpf can do almost anything that mac stuff can do (i have worked with it and my only complains are about perf and some windows architectural stuff...) :)
So you think that the libraries will be unmanaged (which are currently managed) but we can still program wpf stuff managed like now? I can imagine big leaps in perf :)
My question in the previous comment was more about the actual UI of windows 7 (not the technologies) - if there will be more fancy animations like they are used in os x or like vista's only fancy animations in flip3d (but useful not senseless). people want sexy transitions...
And I have discovered (by Reflectoring assemblies and using depends on unmanaged dlls) that Zune software uses some kind of WPF like rendering, at least similar approach. Is it DirectUI you have mentioned?
afaik the zune software uses the mcml stuff from media center software, additionally many folks from the MCE team now work at the zune team :)
You seem to mix up things a bit in this post.
You make no distinction between rendering technologies, control libraries, or layout systems. These things are not all the same.
Also, "Win32" is none of these things. Win32 refers to the system APIs that shipped as part of Windows 95 and NT, and their successors.
Perhaps you meant to list USER, GDI, and GDI+. Those, plus Direct3D / DirectDraw are the way you get pixels onto the screen and move them around.
Windows Forms is mainly just a fancy wrapper around the shell's Common Controls. Depending on the version, they render with GDI / GDI+. They aren't an alternative to it.
DUI is mainly a layout engine, and the comparison to an early XAML is a valid one. But XAML is public and managed, so they are obviously quite different beasts.
WPF is really a collection of things. It renders using DirectX (Direct3D), and uses XAML for layout.
So what does IStartedSomething suggest is being added? A new rendering path? A new layout engine? A new set of common controls? Something else?
I don't even know why you'd list Silverlight here. Or at least why you'd list is as seperate from WPF since it is a subset of that clearly designed for portability.
Windows forms has been working fine with with vector graphics, and they aren't bloated either:
VG.net
Silverlight is unmanaged? Are you sure? SL 1.0 maybe, but that's just a stepping stone to 2.0 - which is basically WPF light with a different MILCORE layer.
Pretty confusing post. I take it that you're not on any of the dev teams.
as i understand he is talking about the runtime and the libraries - in wpf, almost every library is written in managed code - only the rendering stuff (which is milcore.dll) is written in unmanaged code. on the contrary, all the underlying stuff in silverlight is unmanaged, if he states it correctly. that silverlight 2.0 can be programmed with different (managed) languages than JS doesn't imply that its libraries are written in managed code too.
grinser00:
I totally dont' agree. Unless I have misunderstood the details - this is how I understand it.
Silverlight pretty much depends on XAML to represent any visual element. XAML is a managed object graph - an XML way of presenting managed objects in memory. In SL 1.0 there was a temporary method of expressing very simple XAML using unmanaged code. These elements transposed directly to MILCORE primitives - that's why it was easy to have an unmanaged layer there. In SL2.0 that all changes and XAML is once again managed only.
I see some people trying to reconcile the excitement around Silverlight and the lack of take-up for WPF by interpretting this as a unmanaged/managed equation. It's not that simple.
On another point. If there is a native alternative UI API used in Vista then this could be a real issue for the monopoly watches. If this API layer uses any undocumented code beneath it then this potentially breaches the consent decree and the recent agreement with the EU about publicly available APIs.
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