Jon Udell's blogs turn into a cover story

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Jon Udell has turned his series of blog entries on Longhorn into an InfoWorld cover story .  His editor makes the point that the blogging drove some great discussion and contributions to the final article.  It’s cool to see that discussions I took part in with Jon, like here and here, had an impact on the final article.  I’m also glad that after talking to Quentin Clark, Jon concluded that “If you're investing today in XML document formats, you should expect WinFS to do a good job running XPath or XQuery searches over them”.  There’s a lot more from Quentin on Jon’s blog.

 

I think the final article came out well.  I particularly like the order in which Jon lays out the WinFX pillars, since this is exactly how I do it when I give a WinFX overview:

  • First you need to get your data, no matter what device, server or service it lives on.  You want to get to it in a secure, reliable way.  That’s Indigo
  • Now you need a way to store it locally, so that you can find the relationships between data from all these disparate sources and turn it into useful information.  That’s WinFS.
  • Finally, you want a way to see that information, a compelling visualization that makes sense of it all.  That’s Avalon.

Jon also made the point about WinFX betting heavily on .NET as a foundation: “One thing that's not in question, however, is Longhorn's deep commitment to .Net. […] That's great news for the long-term health of Windows, the productivity of its developers, and the security of its users.”  I’d agree.  When ISVs ask what they can do to get ready for Longhorn, the first step is to get familiar with .NET and managed code.  If you have an existing Win32 app, look into the enhanced  C++/CLI support in Visual Studio 2005.  If you’re starting on a new app, write it in managed code from the start.

 

 

Only one sentence in the article struck me as not quite right: “Microsoft is doing nothing to improve Internet Explorer's support for DOM, CSS, SVG, or other standard ways to enrich the browser.”  It might be accurate to say that the Avalon team aren’t investing here, but read the comments of IE’s Group Program Manager, Tony Chor, over at Channel9, or read IE Program Manager Dave Massy’s blog, or take a look at the community discussion on the IE wiki.  I’m pretty sure these guys are doing more than nothing to enrich the browser.

 

Thanks to Scoble for pointing out that the article had hit the web.