InfoQ

News

The Buzz on Acropolis

Posted by James Vastbinder on Jun 18, 2007 12:21 PM

Community
.NET
Topics
Artifacts & Tools,
.NET Framework
Tags
WPF,
Visual Studio,
XAML
For over a year Microsoft has been silent about the next evolution of the Composite UI Application Block, CAB.  On June 5, David Hill of Microsoft announced the coming of a new client application development framework code-named Acropolis.  Through recent years developers have relied on SCSF and CAB to build complex Windows client applications in the .NET Framework.  Especially favorable to the community was the fact the application framework was open source and hosted on CodePlex.com. 

However, with Acropolis, Microsoft will ship it as an add-in to Visual Studio with its own design surfaces.  Still up for discussion is support for the Visual Studio Express editions. 

 The intent is to ship in one year's time a set of components and tools to ease the development of complex many-screened modular client applications using XAML and WPF on the .NET Framework.  While XAML and WPF both shipped with the 3.0 release of the .NET Framework, UI development support for XAML and WPF in Visual Studio 2005 has been lackluster at best.

Expectations for coming Community Technology Previews have been set.  The first several releases are entirely subject to change with coming releases as expressed during Tech Ed 2007.  The community site for Acropolis is being hosted at at windowsclient.net and contains videos, documentation and forums.

The community reaction to Acropolis has trended in the positive direction.  Understandably, Ward Bell of IdeaBlade weighed in with his thoughts and concerns with this summary voicing both anticipation and consternation:
"Acropolis intends to be far more approachable without sacrificing architectural integrity. We should be able to build simple Acropolis applications quickly and then grow them as the waves of requirements roll in – without having to scrap our initial implementation and re-build the foundation.

This will be a neat trick. Can they do it? I think so. But they are off to a rocky start."
Glenn Block posts the beginnings of an early FAQ on Acropolis and the most poignant point related to SCSF/CAB:
"With the announcement of Acropolis, we currently have no further plans for SCSF releases. That being said, our customers should rest assured that we are not dropping support for SCSF."
Only time will tell if Microsoft can deliver on its intended vision for Acropolis improving support for WPF and XAML client application development in Visual Studio.

1 comment

Reply

SCSF future and Prism by Glenn Block Posted May 28, 2008 3:46 AM
  1. Back to top

    SCSF future and Prism

    May 28, 2008 3:46 AM by Glenn Block

    Hi James Based on Acropolis being pulled and folded into the framework we shifted our direction a bit. We revved Smart Client Software Factory for Visual Studio 2008 (msdn.microsoft.com/smartclientfactory). We additonally started on a new deliverable codenamed "Prism" for developing composite applications in WPF (www.codeplex.com/prism). This will be shipping very soon. Glenn

Exclusive Content

Rob Windsor on WCF with REST, JSON and RSS

WCF is not just for SOAP based services and can be used with popular protocols like RSS, REST and JSON. Join Rob Windsor as he introduces WCF 3.5 and its new native support for non-SOAP services.

Christophe Coenraets Discusses Flex 3, AIR, and BlazeDS

Christophe Coenraets discusses Flex 3, Flex Builder, AIR, BlazeDS, Adobe and open source, integrating Flex with existing applications, and integrating RIAs with search engines and browsers.

Debunking Common Refactoring Misconceptions

Danijel Arsenovski attempts to dispel some of the myths around refactoring and how it applies to .NET developers.

REST Eye for the SOA Guy

In this presentation, recorded at QCon San Francisco, CORBA guru Steve Vinoski explains REST from the view of someone who comes to SOA from a traditional, RPC-oriented background.

Choose Feature Teams over Component Teams for Agility

Feature teams are key to scaling agility for large teams. In an excerpt from "Scaling Lean and Agile Development," Larman & Vodde show how feature teams resolve traditional problems & raise new issues

Billy Newport explains Virtualization

Billy Newport talks about virtualization, eXtreme Transaction Processing (XTP) and WebSphere Virtual Enterprise. He discusses hardware, hypervisor, JVM, application and data virtualization.

Virtualization and Security

While virtualization provides many benefits, security can not be a forgotten concept in its application.

Introduction to Agile for Traditional Project Managers

This session is specifically aimed at traditionally trained project managers who are new to Agile, and who would like to be able to relate the PMI's best practices to their Agile equivalents.