NOTE
For anybody who hasn’t already heard of him, Ian Griffiths recently co-authored the hugely successful WPF book titled programming Windows Presentation Foundation and was responsible for training the folks who will be presenting at the upcoming Vista Touchdown events (yep, me included).  Ian is a freelance consultant in the UK and I am extremely thankful for his time to answer today’s Vista Vibe.

How long have you been running Vista for on your desktop (honestly)?
My desktop has had a version of Vista on it since before it was called Vista: it has been running nothing but versions of Longhorn and then Vista since PDC03. However, that’s a little misleading as my desktop isn’t my main machine. My main machine has been a laptop for years now – I bought the desktop specifically to run Longhorn.

So how about my laptop? Even there it’s not straightforward – I have two current laptops: my XP one and my Vista one… I think the closest I can come to answering the question in the spirit intended is to say when the Vista laptop became the main machine, relegating the XP laptop to a second machine. This happened in November 2005 – Vista has been my main OS since then.

Tell me about a Vista feature have you discovered recently.  
The most recent surprise is how much I like the Favorite Links panel in Windows Explorer. This is not the same thing as the old Favorites menu item in XP. It’s a panel into which you can drag folders you want quick access to, so it’s a similar idea, but it seems to be entirely separate from the Internet Explorer favourites. Usefully, any folder you drag into this list will also appear in the common File Save/Load dialogs. (Although right now this seems not to work for apps that customize these dialogs, reverting to the old XP look for them…sigh…)

This sounds pretty trivial, but it happens to suit the way I work particularly well. It’s one of a number of features in Vista where from the description you’d think it was of only marginal benefit, but which you really miss badly when going back to XP. (The breadcrumb bar in Windows Explorer being my favourite example of that.)

Any interesting Vista stories to tell?  
Well there was the time I was running a Vista class, and I was talking about the changes to shutdown handling. Vista fixes the problem in XP where if several apps want to block shutdown, chaos ensues because they all throw up modal dialogs in the middle of the screen, making shutdown a deeply tedious affair. Vista now presents a screen showing you a nice clean list of all the apps blocking the shutdown, along with a big red “Just shut them down now” button.

Of course if I had remembered that the build of Vista I was running at the time didn’t actually have a working version of the feature, I probably wouldn’t have tried to demo it. The machine shut down without showing the new UI, and completely ignoring all the apps the wanted to block it, which wasn’t quite the demo I had in mind…

One of my pet peeves with WPF in particular – is that, whenever I attend a WPF demo there always seems to be a demo that shows either a rotating textbox or a button playing an embedded video.  Do you think that this “trivializes” WPF?  Shouldn’t we see more real business-related demo’s.

I think it’s unfortunate. There’s actually a really good reason for doing that demo, but the point is often totally obscured, leaving people with the impression that WPF is all about rotating textboxes. When done properly, that demo has never really been about rotating textboxes. The point of the demo is that if you are a bit of a graphics geek and you are deeply familiar with how GDI32/GDI+/USER32 works, especially the limitations they suffer regarding composition, then the rotating textbox is a brilliantly concise demo because it’s a starkly simple visual illustration of how WPF removes a load of limitations. (And embedded video has a similar effect on that audience.)

The problem is, the time for this kind of demo is probably long gone. Anyone who is enough of a graphics geek to benefit from that demo probably already knows about WPF… So either you’re telling people something they already know, or you’re using the wrong demo for your audience…

It’s still useful to talk about the limitations of today’s UI technologies and how WPF breaks free from these. But rotating textboxes are probably not the way to do that.

My apologies for dragging out what’s already a long answer, but there’s a related point that’s worth raising. WPF is a long-term strategic move from Microsoft, and as such, v1 is not going to be the whole story. In order to ship something, v1 cannot be as complete as would be ideal. Microsoft’s choices of what to ship and what to defer have been informed by ideas about who the early adopters will be, and it seems like for V1, Microsoft are mostly targeting people who can benefit from the leap forward in graphical capabilities.

They’re not really targeting LOB apps for v1. LOB apps are absolutely a long-term target for WPF, and there will come a day where it won’t make sense to write a Windows-based smart client LOB app in anything else. But that’s some time away. In particular, I think WPF for LOB will only make sense post-Orcas, because that’s when we’ll have the LOB-oriented designer. (Anyone who’s player with the ‘Cider’ previews will know it’s not yet ready for prime time. And it’s not meant to be – they’re aiming to ship that as part of Orcas.)

Given that, it does make sense that they are emphasizing the graphical capabilities today because that’s where it’s strongest. I agree that there is a risk that this trivialises WPF; the right message today for businesses is probably “If you need advanced data visualisation, WPF v1 might be just what you want, but otherwise you probably want to wait a couple of years.” I guess the risk with emphasizing where WPF is strong today is that people may get the impression that graphics is all it will ever do, which isn’t the case. Rather than leaving the demo thinking “I’ll see where they are in a year or so, with a view to using it a couple of years from now”, they can leave with the impression that “this is not for the likes of me.” Which would be sad.

Finally, any plans to follow on from the success of your WPF book with some future titles on the subject? 
Chris and I have always intended to ship a 2nd edition of the WPF book shortly after V1 of WPF ships. Beyond that we have no concrete plans at this stage, but we are both considering a number of possible options. Watch this space…