Reading conference agendas is like interpreting tea leaves: Sessions are dropped, descriptions do not always match the content and there’s usually a long journey involved. But if the listings that appeared in late June on the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference Web site are to be taken literally, Microsoft plans to discuss some new native communications and graphics features, which appear to mirror .NET functionality, for Windows 7.
The conference, commonly known as PDC, is scheduled for Oct. 27 to 30 in Los Angeles. This year’s PDC is the first since 2005.
The PDC agenda lists sessions called Windows 7: Web Services in Native Code and Windows 7: Graphics Advances.
Presently, Windows users must install the .NET Framework 3.0 or above to utilize the Web Services Protocol Stack that is built into the Windows Communication Foundation, introduced last year with Windows Vista and also available through the .NET Framework 3.0 distribution for Windows XP.
Although the description of the “Graphics Advances” session does not divulge much in the way of details, a Microsoft job posting back in March that sought a lead software development engineer for the Windows UI Platform Team appeared to indicate that the company was going to design and implement a new UI framework for Windows.
The job posting noted in part that the framework would “eliminate much of the drudgery of Win32 UI development and enable rich, graphical, animated user interface [sic] by using markup based UI and a small, high performance, native code runtime.”
The listing has since been modified to the point of ambiguity.
The technical disclosure that was detailed in the job posting reveals that Windows 7 may have features that are remarkably similar to .NET. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the graphical subsystem in .NET Framework, and Microsoft Silverlight, a subset of WPF, make use of XAML, which is an XML-based mark up language used to define UI elements.
A spokesperson said that Microsoft was not providing any more detail at this time on specific features of Windows 7.
“It wouldn't surprise me to see Win32 being slowly extended in parallel with .NET,” commented Jeffrey Hammond, a senior analyst with Forrester Research in an e-mail. He went on to note that “there are still a lot of Win32 apps that make Windows a compelling platform (games, browsers, media players). If these were to get pinched off from the most recent advances in core components of the platform, it starts to make the platform less compelling over time."
Hammond added that the integration of certain aspects of the .NET feature set into Windows would not trigger a shift back to C++ and “all the headaches pointers create,” because the transition to .NET is well under way in the enterprise.
Rather, he noted that it would be more meaningful for ISVs, game developers and those who are “hard core” professional developers.
In contrast, Directions on Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry erred on the side of caution, saying that he is always nervous about reading too much into conference agendas. “It is hard to use [show agendas] to draw a conclusion,” he added.
One analyst sees Microsoft as keeping its options open. “I think Microsoft gets a lot of requests for subsets of functionality and standalone versions. It could be hit or miss,” said Laura DiDio, a research fellow with Yankee Group. “It’s tough to say without having all of the facts, and they have a fallback position” in canceling the sessions.
Source:SD Times
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