New UI framework

I found this blog on Windows 7. Nothing special there to notice (about Windows 7 anyway), but it has a special style to it. It seems to be a blog of a Windows developer, but it’s a bit critical on Microsoft too. I’m not sure what does it, but I like it. It may be a real Windows 7 developer blogging this, or maybe not. It doesn’t matter: the blog has found a place in my feedreader. I’m not the only one who thinks so, it seems.

Anyhow, it pointed me to this article on a new UI framework. Another one? I thought that WPF was the next big think, but it seems it’s just to big and bloated to be actually useful. Silverlight – a port of (part of) WPF in unmanaged code, since you don’t need a version of the .Net framework for it to run – is another step to reduce some of the bloat, but it’s browser centric.

So, yet another UI framework from MS? I mean: I even haven’t found the time to get used to WPF, and now there’s another one coming? I know it’s still a few years away, but it got me thinking: is it still useful to learn WPF? There’s still a lot of Winforms development going on, and only just now we’re seeing the first (exposed) real world uses of WPF in the corporation. Will it make sense to get used to WPF, and then try to hop onto yet another UI bandwagon?

I guess we’ll learn more about this on this year’s PDC. The PDC has traditionally been the place for stuff like this to (properly) surface to MS developer. And it makes sense that they cancelled last year’s edition, and move it up to this year: because there’s some (exciting) new stuff to show off.

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