Avalon: Modern Day Compositing & Rendering Engine
Brian Pepin, Development Lead on the Windows Forms team, has some interesting observations about Avalon and what it means to developers. I particularly like his take on Avalon vs. Windows Forms for control developers and users:
“[Avalon is] needed by control developers everywhere so they can create controls with great usability without hiring an army of Win32 experts. It’s needed by end users because they deserve to have great usability in all their applications, not just the ones that Microsoft threw a bazillion dollars at.”
I also like what he has to say about Avalon vs. Windows Forms for application developers:
“It’s also important to realize that from an application developer’s perspective, there is little difference between Avalon and Windows Forms. For years there will be interesting controls built from both technologies.”
In other words, Avalon is the necessary next step to build more powerful controls so that users get the most out of their applications without requiring a giant change in development methodology for application developers.