Apparently, the first release of WPF/e will not support the CLR (.Net Common Language Runtime).
… I had been told that a CLRified version of “WPF/E” would be shipping in the 1.0 release but I think the plan for the team is to make a lot of small updates in quick succession so that they can grow the product as customer needs expand. It’s a good strategy, but even “less than a year” is a long time to wait for managed code.
When Microsoft first announced WPF/e, a CTP (Community Technology Preview) was supposed to be released by the summer of 2006. Then it was changed to “the end of the third quarter”. Finally, when the first CTP appeared on Dec 4, 2006 it did not support managed code (ie C#, etc) programs and neither did the second release at the beginning of this month. And after the latest announcement, who knows when managed code will be supported?
Fortunately, I began porting Vst to Flash several weeks ago and it has been going extremely well – also, I was able to sign up for the first beta release of Adobe Apollo, which apparently will be released shortly.
Microsoft had a chance to really take the lead in the next generation of “Rich Internet Applications” by releasing cross-platform support for WPF at the same time as they released Vista. They have missed this golden opportunity and it will not return.
I still think that WPF has the best graphics that I have seen and that the entire WinFx package contains some very impressive software engineering. Certainly, I will make sure that Vista Smalltalk continues to evolve on Windows Vista – but, given Microsoft’s ongoing screwups, I can’t let that be my only strategy.
