Rinat Abdullin

Does Microsoft plan to implement WPF for SUSE Linux with Gnome?

Microsoft likes to make long well-thought shots.

As Miguel de Icaza points out, there has been some evidence that Microsoft was going to do the language integrated query, long before that happened:

Now that LINQ is out the door, so to speak, I can start focusing my efforts on the next next technology here at Microsoft. Ever since I joined up with the C# team nearly two years ago I’ve been frustrated by my inability to wax poetic about all the goodness we were working on. I was sworn to secrecy. Mum was the word. Perhaps if you were paying attention to the work in C# 2.0 and C-Omega, you may have guessed what was to come. Looking back, it’s easy enough to recognize it in the design of Generics, Iterators and Anonymous methods. The existence of Nullables in there as well should have made it obvious. We were planning ahead for the big pay off, language integrated query.

Similarly it looks like the Windows Presentation Foundation is another Microsoft’s long shot. Reasons:

• Right now it is totally confusing for people why would anyone ever need to use WPF for line-of-business applications.
• Yet Microsoft has spent quite some resources to make it done (and do not tell me that they had no analysis and surveys done before that)
• WPF provides just the right logical separation between the code and the design, to make it usable for creating cross-platform UI applications (While Windows.Forms is really mature, but due to the tight integration into Windows API it is incapable of running natively on Linux platforms).

It may seem that the Mono project would never consider implementing WPF as a priority item, since “only a minority of existing users (Windows.Forms) were willing to rewrite their software to move it to WPF” and the heavy investment is needed (source).

That could be the false impression:

• Microsoft has already been “investing” in Novell and SUSE.
• Microsoft has already been helping the Mono project to create Moonlight analogue for the Silverlight.
• Silverlight hosts subset of the WPF
• Microsoft and Novell have recently started another collaboration on the Linux UI around accessibility (guess what? that’s SUSE and Mono again). And they need some Gnome and Mono hackers.

With all this manure around, there’s got to be a pony someplace © Lois McMaster Bujold

There’s at least 35% chance (and it keeps growing) that this would eventually lead to the WPF being implemented on SUSE Linux through the Mono and Gnome. And then someone would notice that Microsoft Expression Blend runs on this “useless” WPF…

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