The BUILD conference is still about two months out with no clear agenda or sessions but apparently lots of attendees willing to take a leap of faith to find out what's coming from Microsoft. In recent weeks, several theories about some of the anticipated changes in the development model for Windows 8 are gathering steam.
Microsoft's vague references to a new app model based on HTML5 and JavaScript certainly got developers' attention, but what's happening with XAML, Microsoft's Extensive Application Markup Language, introduced alongside Windows Presentation Foundation in 2006, may be more important for line of business developers.
A few people in the industry have already shifted from talking about WPF and Silverlight to focusing on XAML and its associated frameworks and tooling.
Among them is Stephen Forte, chief strategy officer of UI toolset provider Telerik. In a Silverlight is Dead, Long Live XAML blog posting last week, Forte speculated about recent reports on Windows 8 and shared his thoughts on what may be coming in September:
"By putting the XAML runtime team under Windows, Microsoft is making XAML part of the core operating system. This is huge. Anything included as part of the Core OS is treated as royalty inside of Microsoft. It also means that any XAML based application (either in WPF or Silverlight) will run natively as part of Windows, opening up the door to even faster performance."
If the native XAML reports in a popular blog are true, Forte says that he "expects to see one native XAML runtime and development environment ship as part of Windows 8, effectively merging Silverlight and WPF." XAML, more than .NET, will become the common thread in the Microsoft stack for Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10, Windows Phone 7 and Xbox.
Forte explains:
"Since the XAML runtime has moved to Windows core and is no longer part of .NET, a "Silverlight" app that is deployed on the web, can run natively on Windows and take advantage of the local system and hardware, blurring the difference between WPF and Silverlight. It’s a natural evolution since the WPF and Silverlight teams at Microsoft were really one big team at this point."
Telerik is well positioned to help developers take advantage of this evolution if it happens, according to Forte:
"Since the beginning, we have always had only one XAML team with one XAML code base, so our WPF and Silverlight share the exact same codebase and our Windows Phone 7 tools are a subset of that codebase. We see Native XAML as a massive opportunity and will continue to support our XAML tools now and in the future."
