Most
respondents to a Computerworld survey said they prefer environments
such as .NET to the Windows Presentation Foundation of the Vista
operating system.
Eric Lai of Computerworld wrote this article today
Windows developers are confirming the results of a survey released yesterday that found fewer than 1 in 12 programmers currently writing applications targeting Windows Vista .
“None of our customers are saying, ‘G******it, we need those WPF
controls now!’” said Julian Bucknall, CTO for Windows programming tools
maker Developer Express Inc. , referring to one of Vista’s most
highly-touted features, its new graphical subsystem, Windows
Presentation Foundation . Rather, “we find most are still sticking withASP.Net and Windows Forms applications.”
True to Microsoft ’s form,ASP.Net
and Windows Forms and most of Windows XP ’s other legacy technologies
still work fine in Vista. (The converse is also true: many Vista
features can be installed as add-ons to XP.)
But as in every upgrade cycle, Microsoft runs the risk that
developers may bypass the latest technologies — in Vista’s case, WPF,
the XPS printing format that Microsoft is touting as a rival to Adobe
’s Portable Document Format (PDF); Windows Sidebar ‘gadgets,’ and
others — in favor of those further down the road, such as those
expected in Vista’s successor, Windows ‘7′.
“Microsoft tends to dump ten new technologies on us, but only 2 or 3
really stick,” said Michael Krasowski, vice-president of PDSA Inc., a
Microsoft-focused 20-developer firm in Tustin Calif., citing the
Windows DNA Architecture as an example.
Microsoft Corp. undoubtedly wanted to avoid its current predicament. It
has been publicly talking up features in Vista since 2003 — half a
decade.
But such “overmarketing,” as Krasowski calls it, can rebound.
Experienced developers have become jaded towards the third-party apps
Microsoft trots out as exemplars of Redmond’s latest technology —
“demoware,” he calls them — that sparkle with flashy animation and
video.
“You can’t write an enterprise app like a demo. It’d be all soft and
weak under the hood,” he said. “We’d never put all that stuff in
because it couldn’t support 100 concurrent users.”
Some say it’s premature to declare Vista a flop with developers. For
one thing, despite the 140 million copies Microsoft claims to have
shipped, the market hasn’t reached a tipping point yet.
“I can???t see targeting something only to Vista when you have XP and
Windows 2003 out there in huge numbers,” said Dave Noderer, a Microsoft
MVP who runs the Florida .Net User Group as well as his own software
development firm, Computer Ways Inc. in Deerfield Beach, Fla.
Others point out the symbiotic relationship between most Windows
developers and the large enterprises that hire and pay them.
Enterprises are proving even slower than the rest of the market at
moving off XP, say analysts such as Forrester Research Inc.
“Large enterprise don’t transition overnight to the newest platforms,”
said Shannon Braun , a Microsoft MVP and Minneapolis-area-based
programming consultant. “To me the adoption pace [of Vista by
developers] seems pretty normal.”
“Vista is too bleeding-edge — not for us, but for our clients,”
Krasowski said. PDSA’s clients include large, blue-chip customers such
as Kaiser Permanente and Boeing Inc. “They’re all leery of Vista.”
And why shouldn’t they be? According to data released this spring by
migration software vendor AppDNA Ltd., about a fifth of enterprise
applications running on XP break when moved straight to Vista, mostly
due to pre-XP-era code still lingering in the app. That increases to
nearly half for apps migrated from 32-bit XP straight to 64-bit Vista.
Another reason is that Microsoft, in an attempt to catch up to the Mac,
emphasized consumer-y aesthetic features with Vista, with WPF, Aero and
the DirectX 10 3-D graphics rendering engine all aimed at making Vista
or its apps more pleasing to the eye.
More attractive apps are more user-friendly apps, says Microsoft, and
that translates into increased user productivity. But that message
remains a hard sell to enterprises, who demand their apps stay “lean
and mean,” said Krasowski, not get “confused and cluttered.”
Others say learning how to take advantage of Vista’s new visual
features remains daunting. Improving data presentation is “a good thing
to do, but there is a lot of hacking through the undergrowth first,”
Bucknall said. “I don’t think a lot of developers know how to get to
that stage.”
Noderer is optimistic. While XP-era technologies such as Windows
Forms “will be around for many years to come,” he said, Vista-era ones
such as WPF “will slowly rise as the way to do Windows applications.”
But others think that the rise in popularity of server-delivered
business apps — coupled with Microsoft’s recent moves to make its
Internet Explorer 8 browser behave more like other Web browsers — could
make Vista’s client-side graphics-enhancing features irrelevant.
“98% of the apps we write are for the Web,” Krasowski said. “They’re
more flexible and easier to maintain. Many of our clients are migrating
from apps written in VB6 or .Net.”
Heather Havenstein contributed to this story.