Tim Anderson's ITWriting

March 29, 2006

Microsoft should use Flash, says Adobe's John Dowdell

I enjoyed John Dowdell's Report on Mix06 in which he makes the case for Microsoft to compile XAML to SWF, the Flash format, to support its cross-platform ambitions for the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Of course he would say that; but why reinvent the wheel? I can think of two reasons. One is really political and is to do with controlling the platform. Microsoft of all companies knows the value of that.

The other factor is that Microsoft could possibly come up with something better or at least something distinctive that is better in some scenarios. Flash is good and widely deployed, so it's a challenge, but there are advantages in starting with a clean sheet.

Personally I welcome the competition. Flash is not going away, but I'd guess that the threat from WPF will spur innovation from Adobe, in the same way that .NET is good for Java and FireFox is good for IE.

A differentiator is Microsoft's plan to include a Common Language Runtime in WPF/E. I have long thought that Flash should include an implementation of J2ME; now Microsoft will do this with the .NET equivalent.

At least, we think it will. It's been interesting to write about because until recently Microsoft had said that Javascript would be the means of programming WPF/E. For example, this is from Mono leader Miguel de Icaza:

When I spoke to the folks implementing WPF/E at the PDC about six months ago, the plan was to implement a system that would run a subset of WPF in a fine-tuned engine written in C++. The extension language was going to be JScript.

Javascript remains part of the plan, and the demos of WPF/E at Mix06 used Javascript running outside the WPF/E runtime to control the applet. But Microsoft is now stating its intention to include a Common Language Runtime within WPF/E, to provide an additional means of programmatic control. Mike Harsh makes this clear in a blog post yesterday: (the emphasis is mine):

In this post I focused on our javascript programming model and didn't talk about the .NET programming model. We don't yet have the cross platform CLR integrated into our main builds so I can't show screenshots, but Joe's slide deck that I posted last week has some examples of how the model will work.

This chimes with what I was told by Forest Key and with Joe Stegman's slide deck from Mix. Presuming that Microsoft deliver, it will undoubtedly be a very cut-down CLR in its first release, but the long-term implications for .NET are pretty interesting.

Did Microsoft always intend to include a cross-platform CLR in WPF/E? Interesting question. It does seem to be coming together in rather a last-minute fashion; apparently the matter of JIT compilation is still not settled, for example. I'll be watching with keen interest for the first previews later this year.

Tags: wpfe flash adobe microsoft