Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Sparkle a Flash Killer?
Charmless1 writes to tell us eWeek is reporting that Microsoft has release new previews of their upcoming developer tools. Some have even dubbed these new tools as "Flash killers". From the article: "Microsoft's Expression Suite consists of the Expression Graphic Designer, Expression Interactive Designer and the Expression Web Designer. Microsoft has yet to release a CTP for the Web Designer, also known by its codename Quartz." Slashdot also covered some of the pre-release sentiments back in September.
http://channel9.msdn.com/3 878 43
And the videos about sparkle:
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=115
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=157
I liked how this guy said it.
"A lot of people have tried to label Sparkle as a Flash killer but it is not. Sparkle is a new way to deal with winforms that allows custom UI design without coders running into the traditional limitations of development platforms."
This "Quartz" thing might be close. We'll see.
Bill, Steve just called. He wants his silly name back.
Sparkle is not supposed to be a Flash killer. It's designed to allow rich UI's to be created for Windows applications. The new Windows Presentation Layer, formally known as Avalon, needs a UI tool more geared to designers than developers (Visual Studio).
With Sparkle, a graphic designer can easily work on the UI elements while a developer concentrates on the code.
Wrong! You don't need Vista to run it. WPF (Avalon) will also run on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Here are the system requirements
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You can download the bits now and play around with it.
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
I've seen quartz run. I've even had lunch with some of the product team. The same event I saw a demo of WPF (I forget what Microsoft is calling it now - most everything I saw at the conference was identified by codename - but WPF stands for Windows Presentation Foundation... I think it might be "Avalon" now)
I think you have some misguided concepts about how Quartz works. Quartz is just a web designer - with support for rich UI features. It has compatibility target levels - if you want to run on NN 4.0 it supports that with a reduced feature set. If you're interested, my favorite feature of Quartz I saw was actually the XML/XSLT WYSIWYG support (a close runner up is the AJAX RAD)... and that feature is compatible with no-CSS HTML 4.0! I know becuase there's an app I helped write (in 2002 without WYSIWYG) using the exact technology.
If you are targeting the WPF that still doesn't mean that your users will need Windows Vista to run it. Hell, the first demo of WPF I saw was on a Windows XP box. You don't really think the guys developing WPF have been doing it on Vista? Vista isn't even alpha yet... so WPF has been running on XP for some time already. The release of WPF will be back ported to at least XP, and I've heard ME and 2000 server are distinct possibilities. 98 won't be supported, but then 98 has been EOLed for a while. Besides... if you can't be bothered to upgrade your operating system once in eight years, then you obviously aren't interested in taking advantage of the latest technology anyways, right?
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
You and everyone else are missing the point. While Sparkle can be used to make apps that run in IE, it is primarily for developing apps. It is not an plugin for IE. It is not intended to sweep the internet. It is for Windows. Sparkle is the designer for the main presentation layer for all of Vista. Microsoft has not to my knowledge ever even called it a "flash killer." It is not really competing with flash.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Sparkle is developed in C#, and due to its compilation to .NET's CLR, it's unlikely that it will be a channel for virus writers to exploit. First off, Sparkle developers don't need to worry about buffer overruns, which have been the hole used in many previous exploits. Second, the CLR can block the use of unauthorized code, preventing the installation of spyware and other trojans. Admittedly, the CLR hasn't yet been as widely adopted as Internet Explorer, so there still may be bugs in the underlying technology. But generally Sparkle's developed using a much more secure architecture than previous Microsoft products and therefore it's unlikely to see the same issues as IIS, IE, and Outlook.
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