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Questions

  1. Tell us little bit about who you are, what you do, and what are you up to these days.
  2. We will start with books for just a second. You have WinForms in a Nutshell from O'Reilly and with the forthcoming .NET 2.0 release, are we going to see a WinForms 2.0 in a Nutshell?
  3. We are having the same discussion for C# in a nutshell. I know what you're talking about. Any estimates on when that would come out?
  4. The next question is you are doing an Avalon book?
  5. Since you have let that cat out of the bag, is this Avalon in a Nutshell or is this something else?
  6. Your editors at MSDN must hate you?
  7. This is true. This is very true. What you are going to cover as part of this Avalon book?
  8. You mentioned XAML and I know at one point at PDC, we had at least three, we had XAML, we had BAML, we had CAML, I don't know if there are others that were being suggested, TAML, VAML, GAML, HAML. Break these down for us, what are we looking at? Everybody knows XAML, but they don't know the others.
  9. It is XAML and BAML and we are done. Let me ask this question. We are hearing a lot about Avalon, we are hearing a lot about this wonderful new presentation layer and I've got to stop and look at the traditional Win32/User32 API and say well it was good enough for me, it was good enough for my father, it was good enough for his father before him, why do we need Avalon? What is the point?
  10. But how many times do we actually see applications where we need video. A lot of the applications being built today are these business apps, these applications that are being done or developed in house, distributed in house, your classic enterprise application. How many people are really putting video into those applications? How many people are doing anything more than just, as a guy I worked with at one point put it, just more than dialogues and data?
  11. Will it be justified, will the cost of learning the new API model because that is what we are looking at. We are looking at out with the old, in with the new and it seems what little I've looked at Avalon, it seems like this is a completely different spec, completely different approach, no more HWNDs, none of that stuff so I as a developer, I am looking at having to learn an entirely new programming model and is the payoff going to be worth the pain?
  12. At least initially you know that there are not going to be very many Avalon developers in the world.
  13. Do you think we will ever see a XAML for WinForms?
  14. The other thing that you start thinking about when you start talking about XAML and you recognize that as an XML format and so forth, is the idea of XAML for web forms for thin client applications and is that at all anywhere on the table. If this is just a way of creating an object model, theoretically I should be able to create a web page System.Web.Ui.Page, as apposed to having to make it a WinForm, bring us back to a single unified programming model.
  15. Since we sort of brought up ASP.NET to begin with, we are seeing a lot of movement. We are seeing a lot of forward progress from Microsoft in the realm of the smart client. The rich client the non-thin client, what ever we want to call this thing, thick client. One of the things that I know that people are wrestling with right now is when do I consider the smart client, the thick client versus the thin client. The browser is clearly something that a lot of people at least today understand and for a number of them the deployment benefits of the browser are still really hard to turn down. Where do you see the smart client thing going? Is this is a flash in the pan? Is this something that's gonna mark the death of the browser?
  16. It is just a matter when Avalon for Linux will ship? That will become the compelling story.
  17. Now its interesting you bring up some of these things in the smart client because i know you, I know that you lead a former life where you were actually doing a lot of Java programming and of course the Java space we had something like this called Java Web Start in the Java launch protocol and it went nowhere. For all intents and purposes it was, to use the classic phrase it was a " lead zeppelin" right out the door. What do you think, I mean will we see the same experience with Click Once as we did with the Web Start or is there something different about the technology and/or the community surrounding the technology that will make Click Once work where Web start didn't?
  18. Do you think then this sort of spins into questions again of the smart client and particularly the smart client working against a Java back end. Is that a feasible architecture for somebody?
  19. Going back for just a second again as I said knowing you as I do, you and I taught Java for a number of years together at DevelopMentor is there anything particularly that you miss in .NETt that we used to have in Java or if you get over into a Java environment that you miss about .NET in the Java space. If there is one thing that you could bring from one platform to the other, what would it be?
  20. A context switch on the Griffith CPU is a little more expensive than it might be for others?
  21. Let's flip back over for a second to some of the WinForm stuff and specifically 2.0. We have been hearing a lot about the ASP.NET 2.0 features that are coming out, your master detail pages and all your stuff, but we haven't been hearing much about WinForms 2.0 features. Give us your two or three favorite WinForms 2.0 enhancements or are there none. Did the Windows Forms team just say "That's it, we're finished, we're going to leave this be until Avalon takes over the world," what were some of the new things we can see in WinForms 2.0?
  22. Somehow Office always remains one generation ahead of the development tools and frameworks that we get from Microsoft, which has always been a source of frustration.
  23. A new programmer, somebody fresh out of college, you can still see the damp behind his ears, comes to you and says, "Mr. Griffiths, I desperately want to learn what's the most important thing you can teach me about programming in the .NET Framework." What do you tell him?