Slashdot Mirror
XAML Development Today, But Not From Microsoft
Paul Colton writes "My company, Xamlon, has just released its flagship product, also called Xamlon. It allows for XAML development on all supported Windows platform, from Win98 through Longhorn. We're also investigating Mono and Java as possible development targets. CNET recently wrote a story of our launch."
My company, Xamlon, has just released its flagship product, also called Xamlon.
.NET 1.1 compatible and runs on any .NET 1.1 platform (Windows 98 - Longhorn)", which is only specific if the reader knows which operating systems are included in the subset Windows 98 - Longhorn, and many do not. If you meant that you could support any operating system released since Windows 98, why didn't you just say that? It leads the reader to think that maybe there is an OS that is not supported somewhere in that subset, but you are not reporting it because of some business reasons.
Thank you for your nice advertisement. No seriously. Why post a story to Slashdot about your own product or service? That is what the millions of Slashdotters around the net are for. It's hard enough for one of us to get a story posted... now we have to compete with the source?
It allows for XAML development on all supported Windows platform, from Win98 through Longhorn.
That's an example of why you should allow journalists to do their job and report news. You forgot to pluralize platform. Your sentence should read, It allows for XAML development on supported Windows platforms.
Grammatically, you can't possibly list supported operating systems in the article by date without explaining yourself, so you should have linked to a page that would show the supported operating system. But even that page is scarce with info about supported operating systems and says: "The engine is
Yes, I think your product seems quite wonderful. But you're going about promotion the wrong way. I happen to like the fact that you're competing with Microsoft based off their own specs!
FTA: Xamlon built the program from the published technical specifications of Microsoft's own user interface development software, which Microsoft itself doesn't plan to release until 2006.
Doesn't that open your company up for lawsuits? (IANAL)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Of course, I could also be a cynic, considering Colton sold Live Software, he may be positioning his new venture for a buyout by Microsoft.
Ob Simpsons: OK, boys, buy him out! .. I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
One again, how much does one of the slashvertizements cost? I have some clients that would love to buy one but I am unable to get a price from you.
Please let me know so we can do business together!
My company, Xamlon, has just figured out a way to advertise its flagship product on Slashdot.
Yet Another Web Site
Well, if you watched the demo movie then you'd know! :p
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Having a flagship product named the same as the company name short-circuits this process for the clue-deficient. How many of has have heard their less-technically-literate people complain that their "Microsoft" crashed? (And of course, who among us would correct such an error, since it has such a nice ring to it...)
No Laughing Allowed!
Why on earth would anyone use XAML over XUL which runs everywhere on every platform?
Got Code?
Build something usefull like a xul plugin for internet exploder.
Got Code?
Enough for the advertisement already. Create a section for that, unchecked by default.
CNET recently wrote a story of our launch
/.'ers) are much less likely to even *look* at the web site/article now... /. effect or not.
:(
Really now... have we sunk *that* low? We're cross-referencing slashvertisements with ad-articles from other news sites with commercial interests of their own?
No matter how good XAMLon is, I (and likely other
MMD (mod me down), but really, is this news? Or even news-worthy... If I tried segueing another post into such a schmalzy plug for my product the readership would MMD into next year.
So why does the inspired editorial staff think this is worthy of it's own post?
Editorial staff, if folk want to plug their crap on /. let em do it through the existing banner ads. Make 'em pay for the privelege.
Or maybe he did pay for the privelege...
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
According to MSDN, it's pronounced "Zamel"
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
krap
3.Foolish, deceitful, or boastful language.
4.Cheap or shoddy material.
5.Miscellaneous or disorganized items; clutter.
KFG
Avalon + XAML = Xamlon
Trademark infringement case in 3.. 2..
At least Lindows was only borrowing -dows from Microsoft. I'd hate to see what happens when you borrow both parts.
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
It is Nick Petreley's law of the computer press, but it also applies to mainstream IT acceptance. Things just don't catch on in the corporate world until Microsoft comes up with a shoddy implementation of the exact same technology.
We've had X11 around for years now, but you didn't really see network-transparent GUIs and thin-client computing with a GUI catch on until Microsoft Terminal Server came out.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Oh wait, we've got several of those already.
.... :-)
Meanwhile us old timers just repeat the mantra "The Internet is not the web" over and over
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
How about a "Products" section where stories about fancy new program X can be posted and the people who are interested in them can read the slashvertisments to their heart's delight. Stories like this which are really just an advertisment for something there doesn't appear to be a lot of interest in don't belong on the front page.
I stole this Sig
Entire story is (apparently) paid advocacy of product in support of Microsoft technology.
Banner ad is for Newsforge's "The Futility of Arguing with Paid Advocates" article.
Quoting:
Robin "Roblimo" Miller writes: I had exactly one question for Brown: "How much would it cost to have you stop putting our Microsoft party line and start advocating Linux instead?"
So I put that same question to the editors! How much did it cost to have you start putting out the Microsoft party line?
/me ducks incoming...
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
For those of you wondering, here's a short explanation from www.xaml.net:
Transaction Authority Markup Language (XAML) is a vendor-neutral standard that enables the coordination and processing of online transactions in the rapidly emerging world of XML web services - the revolutionary new model of Internet-based computing that is now being adopted by all major systems and software vendors. XAML is intended to be a completely open standard for web-based business transactions.
The standard defines a set of XML message formats and interaction models that web services can use in order to provide business-level transactions that span multiple parties across the Internet.
Sigs are for the weak.
My company tried getting into XML but found that HTML solves most of our issues, while XML was way too complicated for our web pages.
I mean, we couldn't even find a tag for BOLD. Any tool that will make XML easier would sure be welcome by the developers at our firm.
$30 Off All Plans: Use code TRIPLESAWBUCK
I'll probably get modded as flaming, but...
If it's a tool that will help developers working in XML it shuold be promoted.
If you don't wnat to read it, then don't.
Nobody's forcing you.
$30 Off All Plans: Use code TRIPLESAWBUCK
Well, XAML and XUL are similar technologies with similar goals. As far as that goes, Mozilla seems to have been there first, and is open source. They are therefore the preferred party. Microsoft has marketing dollars, so they are probably going to attract most developers.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
"Do I know more than you about your own language???
Its "per se" and it's latin."
Unless the author of the original post is around 2000 years old and dead I would suspect that Latin isn't their language.
To be a proper pedant you should probably spell its without the apostrophe and capitalise Latin as a proper noun.
English seems to have many spellings over the years, "per say" got the meaning across well enough for me.
Great work furthering Microsoft guys! I'm sure your mothers must be very proud that you are helping giant corperations across the street like this, where they can then push you in front of a truck.
If you want to do the world a favor, try to spread Mozilla's XUL around. Develop a plugin that lets you run XUL apps in IE. Work on a dev environemnt for XUL.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's also not obvious from the article if XAML is cross browser capable. Does it spit out web standards based HTML/XHTML or whatever or does it use an IE only browser plugin? They say it only supports IE on windows platforms but they're looking at Mono and Linux. Does this mean the development tool only runs on windows or that XAML will only ever run on IE?
*Poof* It's gone. It's just temporary, but it always makes me feel better at the end of the day.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
Let me know when it supports more than Winblows.
Would love to use something like this for my company but I need cross-platform capability.
Give me a version that outputs W3C spec compliant UI code and runs on either Linux, OSX, or Solaris and I will make the investment.
And your website sign-up form is broken, by the way. At least it doesnt work in Mozilla on Linux. Would like to sign-up, but can't.
Why post a story to Slashdot about your own product or service? That is what the millions of Slashdotters around the net are for. It's hard enough for one of us to get a story posted... now we have to compete with the source?
Amen brotha! Give me distorted third and fourth hand information any day. Slashdot is going to hell in a handbasket...now they're posting articles from the sources. What's next, original news content? Man I can barely tolerate original book and movie reviews. Perish the thought...
Either you were trying to be funny (I find the statement above in particular amusing), or you aren't in the journalism business. Generally, readers prefer information from "the source". I hate to break it to you, but a large part of "journalism" is driven by press releases. Over half of the content of typical magazines and newspapers is of the nature of this article.
I can also say you're not a struggling self-employed tech professional if you think Xamlon is going about it's promotion the wrong way. This guy managed to get column inches on two huge websites for next to nothing. I'd say they've made a promotional coup!
Yes, it is a shameless plug. However it seems to me that in marketing you have to check your pride at the door and plug away. At least this poster isn't like some others and included more than just links to his own site. Beyond that, regardless of the source of the information, it is a very intriguing development. A brash upstart was able to implement behemoth Microsoft's specs before Microsoft itself does? That sure takes the wind out of Longhorn's sales if you ask me. The possibility/likelyhood of it running on Linux/MONO floors me...that would be awesome! To think that it could technically be possible to make Longhorn-compatible apps that run on Linux before Longhorn is even released...amazing.
You DO bring up a very important question though:
Doesn't that open your company up for lawsuits?
What do the license agreements attached to Microsoft's specs say about this? I remember rumblings about not being able to implement them without Microsoft's blessing, or the possibility that MS has/plans to incumber the license to such specs with restrictions forbidding their use in GPL/LGPL implementations. OTOH, Mono is a GPL/LGPL implementation of a MS spec and they have not faced legal challenges. This could be because the CLR and C# have been submitted to standards organisations. If MS is trying to maintain good will in the community and wants to make XAML an official standard then they may not be able to prevent others from implementing their specs. Does anyone out hter know the real legal situation here?
So many people are complaining about this being a slashvertisement. When there was a story about Yellow Dog 4 coming out no one complained. Or the distro with the swahili name. If announcing new software or new versions is so horrible why isn't everybody up in arms about the freshmeat section on the front page?
If you really feel that FOSS is the better answer and that FOSS projects can compete solely on their merits then equal exposure is not only fair, it is critical to proving that. If someone posts about a proprietary project, rather than whine about it, point out which FOSS solution does the job better. If one doesn't exist, write it. Or if you can't do those things and you think that the proprietary software in question sucks, post a review of it. Do something constructive.
This is really some brilliant work. Paul saw an opportunity to take what will become a defacto standard when Longhorn is shipped (or shortly thereafter) and beat Microsoft to the punch. This is a great way for big companies to play with big giants like MS, and take advantage of their slow development times for huge projects.
XUL is a great idea, but it will never catch on unless a GUI designer is created. Hand coding UI xml sucks, hand coding UI rdf+xml is approximately as anal retentive as pointalism. XAML is noticably less verbose than XUL and I can almost guarantee that there will be a nice GUI designer for it.
No, XAML is not better than XUL, XUL is badass tech, but the outlook for its adoption is bleak at the moment. A nice GUI designer and pyXPCOM could fix that though.
XUL stands for eXtensible User-interface Language, which if I'm not mistaken is an XML dialect (XML of course being eXtensible Markup Language).
It was dreamed up by the Mozilla team to allow GUI interfaces to be designed in a cross-platform manner without referring to the inner-workings of the platform. It has considerable support and allows you to use mozilla as your development platform instead of just a browser. The mozilla engine which itself is cross-platform handles all the nasty stuff under the hood.
Avalon is Microsoft's answer to XUL. It's not as powerful. It's not cross-platform. It doesn't free you from the underpinnings and shortcomings of the underlying OS. It just makes it easier to develop in it. It also allows for using SVG graphics (another XML dialect).
XAML is this company's knock-off product that beats Microsoft to the punch. How well it does it is anyone's guess at this point. I myself don't know.
However, I do know that it's not cross-platform and that's why everyone is talking about promoting XUL instead of XAML.
XAML is this company's ticket into getting acquired, IMHO.
Later.
What, you mean like this?
With all the generously moderated posts about slashdot advertising, the herd has forgotten about this OPEN SOURCE PROJECT that does the same thing as Xamlon!
Amazing magic tricks
Looking at the xulmaker web page, I don't have high hopes for it:
Microsoft is advertising XAMLON as being a key feature of Longhorn. With XAML available for Windows versions as early as 98, the upgrade cycle might be breaking. The outcome should be interesting.
XAML is still vaporware, MS could change the XAML specs lots of times till 2006. Applications based on Xamlon would probably need lots of modifications to work on MS XAML. And still you are only targeting windows.
l
XUL on the other hand is multiplatform and you can code XUL apps right now. A problem with XUL atm is that you cann't write stand-alone apps. Your XUL apps need to run through a mozilla browser.
That is all to change though, with the release of XRE http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/xre.html and GRE http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/GRE.htm
I just hope these runtimes are released before MS releases XAML.
VStrider.
Laszlo Systems just announced an open-source cross-platform XML/Javascript based app building tool. That is much more interesting news I would think.