Avalon APIs

miguel makes good comment on the delays for Longhorn and what Avalon might be like when it arrives.

From the Free Software perspective, I like how Miguel contrasts API stability and how GNOME has learnt how to ship things that aren't set in concrete until real developers have been using them in anger. i.e. haven't become part of the platform. This is important, no-one writes perfect code (except g it seems :-) so giving APIs time to settle before solidifying them is a good idea that has emerged in GNOME. We don't want .NET 1.0/1.1 style incompatabilities going forward with Avalon.

Learn from GNOME - the desktop to rule them all :-)

From the software engineering perspective, I don't envy those guys writing Avalon. Overnight it appears they've inherited two target platforms - Longhorn and XP, with similar delivery dates, meaning compromises between compatability issues or functionality trade-offs. Given the bugs my team found with differences between .NET on Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and between the English and Traditional Chinese versions of each of these, I can't see them avoiding this sort of debacle again.

| 02 Sep 2004 | #