'Avalon' Extended to Mac, Web Devices

At this week's Professional Developers Conference, a lot of the focus has been on making the user experience within Windows better. However, Microsoft is also aiming to extend that same user experience across platforms and devices through "Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere," or WPF/E.

Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly code-named "Avalon," is the new unified graphical presentation system for Windows Vista. It is designed to take advantage of modern hardware to create better graphical interfaces for Windows applications. Avalon is based on XAML, an XML-based interface language.

Like its bigger brother, WPF/E relies on XAML and JavaScript to build pages. Since older versions of Windows, as well as other operating systems such as Mac OS X, support JavaScript, a developer could use WPF/E to save development time by only coding a single application that can be deployed on many systems.

For example, at a PDC keynote this week, a Netflix application built upon XAML was demoed on the full Presentation Foundation in Windows Vista, then through WPF/E on a PDA and smart phone without a significant degradation in usability.

Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox says that Microsoft is making great efforts to embrace the competition and understanding that brand exclusivity is not something which many consumers prefer. During PDC 2005, Symbian cell phones were demoed, Firefox browsers were used and Apple's Safari browser even made an appearance.

"It's about time Microsoft took such an approach," Wilcox told BetaNews. "Windows is entrenched, so it's a low-risk strategy with potentially big pay off for Microsoft, particularly as the company tries to woo more developers to its tools."

WPF/E is smaller than the full subset of APIs that come with Vista, and only about one megabyte of runtimes will be required to run applications. Since it has less functionality, interfaces displayed using WPF/E will not be as rich, but they will be similar, Microsoft says.