Microsoft delivers test build of new tool for building line-of-biz apps

At TechEd 2007, Microsoft released a first Community Technology Preview (CTP) build of "Acropolis," a set of components and tools for building line-of-business, portal-style .Net applications.

Acropolis is "part of the '.NET Client Futures' wave of releases, our preview of upcoming technologies for Windows client development," Microsoft officials explained on the new WindowsClient.Net site.

Software developer Don Burnett explained the sweet spot for Acropolis on his Don.Net blog:

"(T)here has been much comment over the last few months that while WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is great for Designers there is not much joy there for winforms (Windows Forms) developers. People have complained about a lack of components that match the functionality provided by WinForms."

Enter Acropolis.

Microsoft blogger Brad Abrams noted that "Acropolis will NOT ship with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5… Rather it will ship as an “option pack” style release that works super well with your Visual Studio 2008. Later we fully expect to fold in Acropolis into the next major release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework."

So now we know about at least one piece of the next version of .Net Framework (.Net Framework "Hawaii," I guess....).