*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Ayende wrote a post about Acropolis as another executable XML language.  Then a few other people chimed in on comments about Acropolis being another example of Microsoft providing tools to turn bad developers into mediocre developers.  I think the point of Acropolis has been totally lost in this conversation so please allow me to weigh in.

To start with WPF is already expressed in XML.  This has been known for awhile and we've all seen amazing results of expressing the UI declaratively.  Look at all the eye candy WPF and Silverlight has dazzled us with over the past several months as an example.  Acropolis is simply leveraging the new WPF stack so to call it an executable XML language is a little far fetched.  Of course it is true that XAML generated to display WPF applications is in XML format but it isn't a language it is merely parsed.  Calling Acropolis an executable XML language is like calling a component or control that ships out the box with the framework a language because that is what Acropolis is, additional controls that are going to be shipping to enhance WPF which in return will help us composite our client applications better.  

Acropolis isn't a language but merely an extension of controls and patterns to WPF similar to the Smart Client Software Factory and CAB built leveraging the richness of Windows Presentation Foundation.   That is the Forrest Gump definition of how I would explain it.

We've already seen and tried to solve a lot of the problems developers face in building rich client applications with SCSF and CAB.  Acropolis is no different in what it is trying to solve just in how it is put together.  Meaning Acropolis is built on the WPF stack rather than built on object oriented design patterns.  Under the hood there are design patterns going on I am sure but they are abstracted to controls. 

To give you an analogy here is how I would think about it.  To me it is no different than Asp.Net 2.0 shipping the Login controls.  This is an example of a common problem web developers face and an abstract way of dealing with that problem.  Acropolis to me is no different in the fact that there are inherent things as client developers we have to do each and every time we start a client application.  Acropolis will hopefully help us solve these problems, but it isn't a new XML language.  It also has nothing to do making bad developers mediocre developers as one commenter pointed out.  Just as the login control bundled with Asp.Net 2.0 didn't make bad developers mediocre developers.

The point of Acropolis is to take things that are "common" that client developers have to do and abstract the repetitiveness of building composite applications into something that can be reused in the framework.   As Brad Abrams pointed out in his comment there is still separation of code and business logic. 

I saw at lengthy talk on Acropolis at TechEd done by Kathy Kam and mostly what I saw was a set of new controls that will assist client developers in building out the plumbing of smart client applications faster.  It is still new but the direction it is going will in my opinion solve what it is trying to solve if done correctly. 

It is the start of our last day of TechEd 2007 and I've had a rough morning getting to the convention center.  I seriously can barely walk.  With 4 days of continuously standing in lines at Disney World before TechEd and then walking miles a day at TechEd I'm immobile.  Before you start thinking I'm some kind of wuss just know that I've had feet problems for years.  I think I am at the point that I am going to have to seriously have a podiatrist look into it.  The bones on the back of my heels hurt with every step.  Literally I'm hobbling around trying to get to sessions.  I'm sitting in the "Creating and Delivering Rich Media and Video on with Web with Silverlight, Expression Studio, and Windows Server 2008" and I chose it not only for the topic but because it was the nearest session from the bus drop off.

To limit my walking today all the sessions I attend with be on the South side or in the expo in the blue rooms.  Note to self, by a Segway. 

When I got to the convention center this morning I had to sit down and do some work.  Email was backing up on me left and right.  One of my team members and I found a table and got some work done.  Then it was lunch time which gets my vote for worst lunch this week.

After lunch I met up with David Silverlight in the developer area where I picked up my 6th place winnings from http://community-credit.com for the month of May and my award winning plaque.  I spent the next several hours hanging out in the developer area talking to the product teams about different technologies.

A few highlights were I stopped by the Workflow Foundation and WCF booth and was talking to a Microsoft employee about WF and it turns out it was Tom Lake!  For those that don't know, Tom is on the SDK test team for Workflow Foundation and used to be on the Biztalk team.  Tom answers a lot of forum posts on Workflow Foundation and has written a lot of samples.  It was great to meet him finally since he's even answered some of my questions as I explored WF.  Great guy and very easy to talk to.  If you have been wondering about WF, stop by and chat with Tom, he can walk you up and down the stack.  Tom it was a pleasure to put a name with a face.

I bumped into Alexei and we chatted about agile development and Team Foundation Server.  I met Alexei in person earlier in the week and it was good to put another face with a name since Alexei spoke at our Internal .Net User Group during the month of April.  I then walked over to the Data Dude booth to get some ideas on how to version database diffs, or at least how I was going to try to handle it with not everyone on our team having a licensed copy of Data Dude.  I chatted with several members of the C# team that I met in March at the MVP Summit and got done just in time to attend the Acropolis session.

I blogged about Acropolis earlier this week but this was a deep dive session showing the current state of affairs.  After the session was over I don't think I learned anything I can use yet.  Things are still very rough but the vision of what it is going to be I think is something to keep an eye on.  I am going to have to get the bits and start playing with it.  During the session the presenter had to restart Visual Studio at least 5 times so if you do download the bits, expect things to be really rough.

After the Acropolis session I checked email and saw that I had received my CodeRush and Refactor! license I won from .Net Rocks.  I downloaded the bits real quick and then jumped on the bus so I could install it on the way back to the hotel.  As soon as I got back to the hotel I dropped my laptop off at the hotel and picked up Ellen.  We jumped back on the bus and were off to the TechEd party which was at the Islands of Adventure theme park at Universal.