Submitted by “Microsoft today announced its first collaboration with the open source Eclipse Foundation by committing provide engineering support to allow the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit use Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation. The move aims to make it easier for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista, according to Microsoft.”
Excellent news…
The whole point of Sun’s lawsuit against Microsoft back in the 90s was that Microsoft was trying to add stuff to Java that would make Java programs look more like Windows programs, with the negative side effect that Java programs written for Windows would not run on other platforms.
I wonder why Microsoft didn’t just do something like this back then; assuming that tying in this way will still allow Java programs written to look like Vista programs to run unaltered on other platforms?
This does beg the question, who in their right mind uses Java to write desktop applications? But that’s another issue all together.
The same people who would use .NET to write desktop applications. This is coming from experience.
There are many situations where it makes sense to work with managed code.
Typically applications that used to be VBA(in Access, adp-style. Connected to server, not using local db files obviously) are now often being ported to .NET
Aside from the fact that Microsoft slowly have been killing proper SQL-connectivity support in Access it makes sense. .NET is quite faster than VBA, they can write in a language that’s quite familiar, popular(means more peopel and more resources.)
These are typicaly making programs such as project manegemant systems(for instance for the Oil Bussiness). None of these gives a rat’s ass if these programs don’t run faster than Lynx, all they care about is that it is easy to program, and get working. (Managed code may be slow but it’s easier to avoid bugs, and easier to debug.)
In my experience I’ve found .NET to be faster than Java. Might been bad/good luck, but it wouldn’t suprise me if that’s the case. After all… .NET is prettymuch a ripoff after Java, only that it’s made after Java so they could see what mistakes where made in Java and fix them from the start. (Not dissing Java though, it was in it’s time quite a excellent idea! And it has multiplattform wich MS has chosen for obvious reasons not to implement in .NET)
Now, making 3D Studio Max in Java or .NET is probably not a good idea… but there are uses for managed code.
Except, of course, that .NET apps are fast and look/feel like “native” applications, on XP at least. I’ve been using Paint.NET (for example) at work, and there doesn’t seem to be any slow-down or anything due to it being managed code.
Compared to Eclipse, it feels like it’s been written in pure assembly language.
I like Eclipse (it crashes less than VisualStudio, at least for me), I just wish it was faster.
This seems like a weird move for MS.
That is incorrect. MS’s implementation of Java wasn’t able to pass Sun’s compliancy test due to it having Windows only hooks…it had nothing to do with the way the software it created ‘looked’ or whatnot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%2B%2B#Litigation_against_J.2…
Indeed… people try to make it sound like the MS lawsuit was about MS wanting to extend java. In reality the lawsuit wasn’t so much about that as it was MS’s desire to extend it in ways that caused Sun compatible Java apps to fail when run on MS VMs.
MS refused to fix the issues, and thus the lawsuit.
Having tried for several years, and failed, to make anything worthwhile come out of WPF,
Microsoft PR execs decide to offer it to their main competitors in the hope that they too will be sucked into the massive black holes of failure that always seem to surround managed technologies from Microsoft.
[/satire]
Coming soon, Silverlight support for Eclipse!
WPF isn’t a failure, it is just that the tooling isn’t at the point yet where you can approach it like a VB6 programmer (ie: without thought). Its actually my favorite UI platform to work with, and I have tried many of them. But you actually have to learn it before you can use it, as opposed to winforms which is basically drag and drop.
Out of all the 3.5 technologies, WPF is getting the least adoption because of that, which is ironic as it is one of the most impressive (IMO WF was the biggest failure. The idea is “BizTalk lite”, but the performance is so abysmal it is only useful in very specific scenarios.)
The funny thing is that one of the silverlight advantages being pushed at us .net guys from redmond is you can “leverage your existing WPF skills”. Instead, the way it is turning out is that Silverlight is the driving force in WPF adoption.
… is that they are working with SWT, and not Swing
I was just saying the same thing to a co-worker. Wouldn’t surprise me one bit if this was just another way for Microsoft to try and fragment the community. Either way, I really don’t care what they do with this.
I’ve done development on both Swing and SWT. SWT is great for quickly putting up a UI, but Swing is so much more powerful, and does not require loading 3rd party jars and libraries to make it work.
Swing doesn’t use native widgets, so I am not sure what MS could do to help Swing out with WPF, other than perhaps provide look and feel documentation.
SWT on the other hand makes use of native widgets for almost everything, thus if SWT provides WPF support it’s going to have to develop java wrappers for native WPF widgets. I imagine any assistance MS can provide to ease this integration will be welcome.
From the article …
So, the goal is to make it look and feel native. If that is the goal, then why not work with Sun to make the Swing Vista L&F have a more native feel to it? If they truly want to help Java, then why not take the more “pure” java approach? They state in the article that they want to show the community they are more open, but they are doing so by putting proprietary hooks into a windows-only version of SWT. My only hope would be that, whatever UI additions they add would be cross-compatible with the other SWT ports.
Because the Swing folks can paint whatever pixels they want to on the screen – the UI is entirely up to them, they don’t need Microsoft’s help.
SWT on the other hand wraps native widgets, and as WPF is a managed framework, I imagine wrapping WPF widgets is a bit more complicated than the current implementation.
IIRC the point of using SWT in Eclipse was to make it faster and to provide a native look and feel.
I’m glad to see more and more cooperation with open source projects as “partners.” Perhaps Microsoft has had a history of cooperation like this for what I know, but I can see how this is about getting more people aboard the MS platform. I believe both developers and consumers should benefit from this move.
Edited 2008-03-20 20:28 UTC