Avalon Intro Session

Posted on October 27th, 2003

Avalon is truly and amazing thing. The demos they just showed us included dragging elements around in a window and rotating them while running.. this included an embedded movie (which was added to the app with one XAML tag and a few lines of “code-behind” to hook up a toggle button. Everything in Avalon is vector based and goes right to the video card and takes advantage of hardware acceleration, just like games do. This gives you a lot in terms of capabilities for effects and UI styling in you apps. Adobe did a demo in the keynote which showed how they tweaked After Effects to create an animation template UI that got live data from a web service and displayed it in the app (this is a lot like flash, but it’s way way way beyond what flash offers today.. although they seem to be moving there). They also demoed how you could do personalization in your app with only a different from end… this also gives you the flexibility to have a UI graphics designer do your UI and have programmers do the coding (how ASP.NET works now).
It was very impressive and as an Intranet applications developer, it made me wonder if any of the things that make an intranet appealing to run internal application is relevant anymore. I mean you can now do OneClick deployment (and updates) of Win apps which can call out to web services (centralized logic) to perform functionality. So you have all the benefits of web but with a much richer UI and tighter integration with the users computer and files (because you dont have the security problems of a hostile app like a web browser). Of course I am saying this without attending any of the ASP.NET 2.0 sessions but it will be interesting to see how it will evolve along these lines.
more to come.

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One Response to “Avalon Intro Session”

1. Anonymous Says:
   October 28th, 2003 at 7:07 am

   Woot! We’re right there with you man! Keep the good info coming!

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