Karl Seguin

.NET From Ottawa, Ontario - http://twitter.com/karlseguin/

Microsoft's Presentation Technologies

I just spent 30 seconds trying to list all of the current presentation technologies offered by Microsoft. I didn't include stuff like Access and OOXML, but I'm sure the list is far from complete. I did list HTML because it's a valid choice for Windows Media Center.

Windows Media Center Presentation Layer and MCML
Windows Presentation Framework and XAML
Microsoft Foundation Class
WinForms and .NET
WinForms and VB6
WinCE and .NET Compact Framework
Web and ASP.NET
Web and VBScript
Web and Javascript
Atlas declarative programming (dunno what it's called)
HTML

There seems to be some serious overlap. I realize *some* of this is caused by legacy issues (VB6), but the total lack of unification is a real downer as far as I'm concerned. It might never happen, but I look forward to the day when the TextBox class is only found in a single namespace (System.UI.TextBox). I'm also amused that Windows Media Center needed it's own suite of assemblies and classes AND it's own markup language.

Published Feb 05 2007, 06:55 PM by karl

Filed under: Short Outbursts

Comments

Joe said:

So you're saying there's the web (client and server), WinForms, WPF and MCE.

The only one that I would find an issue with is really the MCE vs WPF strands. I would be very surprised not to see these combined in the future.

As for web versus WPF, the strategic convergence story has to be WPF/E. And the vehicle for this would be Atlas.

# February 5, 2007 9:25 PM

Mike Weiss said:

Don't forget...

Win32 API, the mother of all of this.

ATL and WTL.

Microsoft Forms 2.0 ActiveX controls (FM20.dll) - there is a whole set of reimplimented edit boxes and crap in there... (for Office and other ActiveX containers)

# February 6, 2007 8:11 AM

Jeremy D. Miller said:

It sounds nice, but I betcha that a truly unified System.UI.TextBox would be:

1.) Massive in complexity

2.) The abstraction would leak like mad

# February 6, 2007 8:40 AM

karl said:

Jeremy:

If you implemented it today it would...but in the future it might be doable (portable devices might be powerful enough to not require a subset...windows media center might just be normal PC's running windows..oh wait..they are). The only thing I think would be hard to unify is the web stuff, since it isn't controlled by MS...

# February 6, 2007 9:09 AM

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