Avalon developer preview ships on MSDN Chris Anderson , who is an architect on the Avalon team, announced on Friday that Avalon has shipped a new developer preview to MSDN subscribers .What is really really cool is that Avalon is going to ship on Windows XP, Windows 2003, AND Longhorn. From the MSDN developer center … “Avalon” is the code name for Microsoft’s unified presentation subsystem for Windows. It consists of a display engine and a managed-code framework. “Avalon” unifies how Windows creates, displays, and manipulates documents, media, and user interfaces, which enables developers and designers to create visually-stunning, differentiated user experiences that improve customer connection. The “Avalon” Engine. The “Avalon” engine unifies the way developers and designers experience documents, media, and UI, providing a single runtime for browser-based experiences, forms-based applications, graphics, video, audio, and documents. “Avalon” is built on top of DirectX, which enables it to unleash the full power of the graphics hardware present in modern computers, and is engineered to exploit advances in hardware moving forward. For example, the “Avalon” vector-based rendering engine enables applications to scale to take advantage of high-dpi monitors without requiring extra work on the part of the developer or user. Similarly, when “Avalon” detects a video card that supports hardware acceleration, it takes advantage of it. The “Avalon” Framework. The “Avalon” framework delivers solutions for media, user interface design, and documents that go well beyond what developers have today. “Avalon” is designed for extensibility, enabling developers to create their own controls on top of the “Avalon” engine from scratch or by subclassing existing “Avalon” controls. Central to the “Avalon” framework are controls for shapes, documents, images, video, animation, 3D, and panels , in which to place controls and content. These primitives provide the building blocks for developing next generation user experiences. XAML. “Avalon” also introduces XAML , a markup language to declaratively represent user interface for Windows applications, improving the richness of the tools with which developers and designers can compose and repurpose UI. For Web developers, XAML provides a familiar UI description paradigm. XAML also enables the separation of UI design from the underlying code, enabling developers and designers to work more closely together. [ Currently Playing : Summer - Alien Ant Farm - ANThology (04:16) ] Comments Anonymous June 08, 2009 PingBack from http://quickdietsite.info/story.php?id=10877 Additional resources Last updated on 2004-11-22