Vista Launch: The impact of Vista and Office on developers

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The arrival of a new version of Windows and a redesigned Office, a host of new underlying technologies, not to mention new interfaces will have huge implications for developers of applications, web sites and processes.

Talking on this subject, Ian Moulster, Developer Platform Evangelist at Microsoft, first highlighted a strong attendance at the official UK 'developer launch' of the software, held earlier this month at Microsoft's UK headquarters in Reading (see here for online resources from the event).

The main point he made concerned rapid development, an important issue when development teams are squeezed and software lifecycles shortened. 'Windows Vista lets developers build a new generation of applications,' he claimed, highlighting a recent project from the London Underground featuring a rich media interface which was built in three weeks buy a small team of four developers.

Getting down into more detail, developers will be using version 3 of the Microsoft .Net framework (as opposed to version 2 featured with Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft's flagship development suite). Moulster highlighted four main elements to the framework: support for Web services (the so called WS-* specifications), the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the Windows Workflow Engine and Card Space (formerly known as InfoCard).

As is usual with Vista, the first item to get attention was the user interface, which in this context means the WPF and its support for a richer GUI.

Also, one of the historic strengths of Windows development has been adherence to Windows Interface Guidelines - the standardised way of presenting information within Windows (the button options within dialogue boxes, menu layout conventions, etc) that makes it easier for a user to drive an unfamiliar application. With its new and tweaked interface elements, Vista will require developers to make appropriate coding changes for standard interface elements. An app that is simply ported from XP will look out of place, pointed out Moulster.

You can find details of the updated guidelines on MSDN.

An important element within the WPF, he said, is XAML (extensible application markup language), which enables you to represent the whole of a UI in XML - via Expression Blend - which other tools within Visual Studio can make use of. This can obviously speed development times and aid rapid prototyping by ensuring that a suitable constructed interface will have all the appropriate coding functions hooked in behind. 'Designers and developers will be working together in much more interactive ways than in the past,' said Moulster.

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