June 5th, 2007
Rich Enterprise Applications with Microsoft "Acropolis"
This morning Microsoft made a move to bring the power of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) to the enterprise level developers with a Community Technology Preview of “Acropolis“. Acropolis is interesting for a couple of big reasons. First of all, it brings Windows Forms (WinForms) closer WPF. WinForms is a user interface API that predated WPF and there are a lot of big, business like enterprise applications that are built using WinForms. Acropolis is going to make it easy to incorporate those parts into new applications.
That leads to the next big reason Acropolis is interesting: it’s core role is enabling business-focused applications to be built with all the pizazz and power of WPF. Outlook is an example of the type of business applications you can create with Acropolis. Don Burnett has a fantastic write up, but with Acropolis, you can build components and then deliver them in a single application with a fairly dynamic interface. The components are all reusable so you can deploy some very powerful dashboard applications without having to recode anything.
These kinds of dashboard applications are pretty important in the enterprise for things like data visualization and just combining a lot of tasks into a central application. You could do a lot of this with WinForms before, but WPF didn’t have the support that these developers needed to adopt it. Now it does and it should mean a lot more WPF adoption at high levels. Hopefully that means that these people will be exposed to the richer experiences that WPF can offer and really see how that differentiates their old apps from new ones. Getting buy in for experience at the enterprise level would be great.
Brad Abrams has a collection of links to a lot of Acropolis coverage.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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