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Universal Desktop Daily - Wednesday, November 1, 2006

A full session of Apollo online, Desktop 2.0 and an episode of the Microsoft Developer Show Podcast talking about Windows Presentation Foundation.
Written by Ryan Stewart, Contributor

A quick note about the picture. I got into the holiday spirit yesterday with the Jack O' Lantern photo, and I've decided instead of the same old photo every day, I'm going to use Wikipedia to find a photo that is relevant to something that happened on that day in history. Today just happens to be the day my fraternity was founded, so you get the Sigma Phi Epsilon seal. Hopefully it makes things a bit more interesting. I'm all about fun here on the Universal Desktop. 

  • Mike Chambers posted a video of the "Leveraging HTML/JavaScript and AJAX in Apollo Applications" session from MAX last week. It's the full session, so it clocks in at 40 minutes, but I think JavaScript developers will be very interested to see what kinds of things are possible with Apollo, Adobe's upcoming cross-platform runtime for desktop applications. Apollo is about using web technologies to deliver desktop applications, and this is a good session for explaining what that means. If you're short on time, the first demos start at the 3:49 mark.
  • Desktop 2.0 is from a long time ago, but I caught it again as I was going through my feeds and thought it was worth a read. Ashish has it right when he says: "To developers, the same programming model used to develop a desktop app can be employed to develop a web app, or vice versa. To administrators, deploying the desktop app is about as simple as deploying a web app, taking the pain of installers away. To consumers, the richness and user experience one expects from the desktop world is now possible within the browser." The web is great, and Rich Internet Applications aren't about the desktop over the web or the web over the desktop - they're about blending the two to make workflow and experiences better.
  • The Microsoft Developer Show Podcast had an interview with Jeremy Boyd in which they talk about Windows Presentation Foundation. It is kind of long (around 40 minutes) but there is some good discussion about what WPF is, how it will be used, and how you develop in it. One thing towards the end struck me, one of them said "people will always choose the path of least resistance" and then described how that ties into experience. I actually think they got it wrong, I think for too long Rich Internet Applications have been harder to implement. Even now, downloading the Times Reader is harder than going to the website. But the Times Reader also provides a much better experience, so you need to enable that experience in a very resistance-free way. That's an important aspect of RIA adoption. [Found via Jeremy's blog]
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