Re: The Future might be Flex 2

"Eric Grange" wrote:
How about WPF/E support? WPF is actually a really slick platform.

WPF main issue is going to be hardware support for the next half-decade, beyond the fact that it's not out yet.

Surely you know that WPF is part of .NET 3.0 was released for XP several days ago. You must be refering to WPF/E which hasn't appeared in public but isn't expected to need any special hardware.

We're investing "next-gen" UIs here that could run on our customer's hardware, and alas the availability 3D acceleration is proving quite an issue.... almost all recent hardware (apart from thin-clients RDP terminals) our customers bought supports 64bit today or could with an OS upgrade, but the ratio of 3D accelerating hardware is close to zero (at best they only have Intel integrated chipsets... if they had ATI or nVidia chipsets, there would be a hope).
At this point the only option is WPF in "ugly" mode, which is bearable but still slower than even WinForms. Eye-candy WPF brings even top-of-the-line servers to a crawl, and most regular client machines don't have the RAM to run it without swapping (well, their requirement was to run Office apps, and that's what they can do).

I'll not comment except to say the proof of the pudding is in the eating. By this I mean I'm writing this with Vista's Windows Mail on a 4 year old PC with a 800 MHz PIII and 512MB memory and the only hardware addition was a $50 ATI 9550 clone video card stuck in a AGP-4x slot. It dual boots with XP-SP2 and thus I get a firsthand comparison that tells me that Vista has at least if not slightly better speed and user experience and this is with Aero Glass turned on. For the last week I have "lived" in Vista using it for everything but development tasks. In addition to my usual preference of apps, Office 2007 is installed and runs fine however it's new ribbon UI takes some getting used to.

The more I use Vista the more I like it even on this minimal hardware machine and will soon move it to a new machine especially configured for Vista once I figure out exactly what hardware I want.

.

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