Tim Anderson's ITWriting

March 27, 2006

Drilldown into WPF/Everywhere

Microsoft's cross-platform XAML runtime, called WPF/Everywhere, was announced at PDC last year, but little detail was available. That's now changing, following Joe Stegman's presentation at Mix06. I was briefed by Forest Key, Director of Developer Tools Product Management, and I've posted my article here:

Microsoft goes cross-platform with WPF/Everywhere

The possibility of cross-platform .NET has been there since the first, and of course there is ROTOR, but that is for academic use only, and Microsoft has seemed uninterested in deploying .NET beyond Windows. Now we have a commercial, cross-platform .NET implementation from the company. I realise that it is focused on XAML user interfaces, but even so this is a significant step and an acknowledgement that, like it or not, some people do not want to run Windows. The upside for Microsoft is that XAML adoption will be far greater if it runs cross-platform.

It's currently demoware so we can only speculate how well WPF/E will deliver, and whether Microsoft will come close to its "everywhere" objective.

Tags: wpfe mix06 vista wpf