Tim Anderson's ITWriting

January 26, 2004

Microsoft Mini PDC in London

Today Microsoft put on a mini-PDC for UK ISVs, with Don Box, Chris Anderson, and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates among the Microsoft personnel present. Don and Chris gave a good hands-on demo of the three pillars of Longhorn, but I'm not reporting on that; just presenting a few random snippets of things that interested me.

I quizzed the panel at the press briefing about Mono. Microsoft's Mark Quirk said Microsoft is glad to see other implementation of the ECMA specification. But what about implementations which go beyond the ECMA spec, implementing a broad section of the Framework class library? Mark said that Microsoft is pleased to see such developments; it can only be good for .Net. I agree. On the other hand, Don had said earlier that Microsoft is building for Windows, not for cross-platform. So it looks like an attitude of benign neglect is the best the Mono guys can hope for.

I quizzed Don about the inherent problem in WinFS. What happens to the rich metadata when you copy documents between systems, or to other operating systems such as Linux or the Mac? He said that where known file formats support metadata, such as a Word document or an MP3 file, there will be promotion and demotion of properties to WinFS metadata. But as to the problem more generally, he simply said it was "a challenge." Looks like trouble ahead.

Anyone who has seen an Avalon demonstration, such as the hugely impressive Amazon web services client shown at PDC, will likely have seen a highly customised user interface that looks more like a Flash movie than a Windows application. I asked whether this meant that Longhorn would signal a return to the individualism of DOS, where every application works in a different way. Microsoft assured me that this is not intended. There will be an updated Windows style guide and strong encouragement to adhere to standards. If that is the case, I guess it would help if some of the demos hinted at what sort of standards they might be. I'm sure the answer is that Microsoft itself doesn't yet know. I also believe that once graphic designers get their heads round XAML, they won't want to be constrained by a style guide. Watch this space.

I had a chat with Chris Anderson about Windows Forms and Avalon. Currently it's hard to write a fully-fledged Windows Forms application without a dash of PInvoke. For example, the HTML Help API is among many that are not fully wrapped by Framework classes. Will developers still need PInvoke in WinFX? He admitted that occasionally it might be necessary. He also sees a continuing future for unmanaged code; the example he gave was a rendering component for a CAD application.

Since System.Windows.Forms looks like having a relatively short life, is it worth bothering with a winform application now? Chris says yes (well, he would say that), citing the improved productivity of managed code as a primary reason. Of course there is a migration path; non-presentation code will not be obsolete in Longhorn, and there will be good interoperability between WinFx and winforms. You can host winform controls in WinFx, and host WinFX controls in winforms. To me the question is application-dependent. For applications that are heavily GUI-focused, it seems doubtful whether investing in winforms now is really worthwhile.

We also had a discussion about MSHTML versus the rich text rendering engine in Avalon. I had wondered whether Microsoft might rewrite MSHTML in managed code, or else create a Longhorn web browser that converts HTML to Avalon rich text. Chris said no. He said that MSHTML is a complex body of code which does an extraordinary job of rendering even malformed HTML. Since the Internet works on the assumption that this kind of web page renders successfully, and since there are so many quirks and workarounds in MSHTML, Microsoft's developers did not dare to replace it. I hope I'm representing Chris's comments accurately. In essence, it suggests that IE will remain broadly as-is, well, for ever. For richer Internet applications, you are meant to write Windows Forms or in Longhorn Avalon clients for web services. I do find this surprising. It suggests that IE will gradually lose ground to Mozilla, Safari, Opera and others. It also means that we are not going to get a managed code HTML or XHTML rendering component. Of course the rich text engine in Avalon is still a big step forward, and will be easier to work with than either MSHTML or old-style RTF.

Interesting comments about graphics drivers. Currently graphics drivers run within the kernel which is why they can crash Windows. In Longhorn Microsoft will write what Chris called a DirectX Miniport; this means Microsoft will write the code that executes in the kernel, and third-party drivers will run in user mode. This means that an errant driver will no longer cause a blue screen, but rather the system will revert to safe mode VGA, allowing you to shut down cleanly. You will still need to reboot, because graphics cards aren't designed to be independently restarted.

What about Bill Gates? Well, he talked genially about pervasive computing, and answered a small number of deferential and uncontroversial questions. He swears he never said that thing about 640K being enough RAM for anyone; and anyway, the 640K thing was all Intel's fault and nothing to do with Microsoft. On the other hand, he reckons a 64-bit address space is enough for anyone for the foreseeable future. A hostage to fortune :-)

(c) Tim Anderson 26th January 2004. See ITWriting.com for more tech comment.