mediajunk

I attended an intersting talk in Sligo yesterday given by Rob Burke of Microsoft. The subject was upcoming developments in MS .Net and Longhorn largely from a developer's perspective.

I'm not a developer, but as a designer I was nonetheless very interested to learn about Microsoft's "Avalon", which is the presentational component of Longhorn. In one way, Avalon could be regarded as a threat to Flash, yet it seems like a different beast.

Avalon has the potential to change the face of the web (as Flash originally threatened, but never did), and not just because it is an MS product. Avalon's use of XAML -- an XML-based markup language -- seemingly makes designing interactive 3D presentation layers a lot easier than, say, programming ActionScript in Flash. (Of course, that's only my very early view -- I haven't tinkered with any code yet.)

Have a look at this video preview of what Avalon can do -- but don't hold your breath: Avalon isn't due for release until 2006 at the earliest.