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Topic: Apple

Hints of support for WPF/E on Mac

Summary: On Tuesday, Nathan Herring blogged that he was leaving the CoreCLR team to work on the Mac version of the MiniCLR that will make up a part of WPF/E. While the announcement is relatively small, Bruce McLeod noted that this essentially confirms some of the .NET runtime will be ported to Mac OSX.

Ryan Stewart

By Ryan Stewart for The Universal Desktop |

On Tuesday, Nathan Herring blogged that he was leaving the CoreCLR team to work on the Mac version of the MiniCLR that will make up a part of WPF/E. While the announcement is relatively small, Bruce McLeod noted that this essentially confirms some of the .NET runtime will be ported to Mac OSX.

I remain a little bit skeptical about what WPF/E will look like in the end, and while this announcement does show that there is some support within Microsoft for WPF/E and perhaps down the road a full-blown implementation of WPF for Mac, I'm not holding my breath. In the past, Microsoft has only supported Mac just enough to get people "hooked" and then brining them over to the native Microsoft technology. Will WPF/E be any different?

Topic: Apple

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  • I don't expect to see WPF implemented on the Mac

    I doubt MS will implement the entire WPF / .Net 3.0 framework on the Mac. My guess is that it would take too much effort, and it would detract from MS? effort to make WPF/E available everywhere, and more or less consistent across PC OSs.
    P. Douglas
    Reply Vote

    • I don't see how they could

      It's too tightly bound to the current versions of MSWindows. Running it on a Mac would pretty much require shipping half of MSWindows as support libraries.
      Yagotta B. Kidding
      Reply Vote

    • Perhaps

      I'll buy that, especially the distraction part. Although I'm curious to see how far they take WPF/E. Will they do a Linux version? They've said so, but it has been very vague. Will they port a version for devices? There a lot of questions I have about how far they'll take it.
      ryanstewart
      Reply Vote

      • Wiping Penguins From the Earth

        [i]WPF/E. Will they do a Linux version? They've said so, but it has been very vague.[/i]

        That's not the way I remember it. IIRC, their statement was more to the effect that if someone did a Linux version, MS would consider not suing them into oblivion.
        Yagotta B. Kidding
        Reply Vote

      • I don't expect MS to implement WPF/E on Linux

        MS indicated that it will rely on third parties to implement WPF/E on Linux. I expect there are a lot of issues with MS trying do this itself ? including the many flavors of Linux out there. I expect MS will implement WPF/E on its Pocket PC and Smartphone OSs as well ? along with earlier versions of Windows. On just about every other platform, I expect MS will rely on third parties to implement WPF/E ? for economic and other reasons.
        P. Douglas
        Reply Vote
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