November 13, 2003

DevCon:Longhorn Graphics and User Experience

New day, new experiences.

This morning I am attending the DevCon Longhorn track that is talking about the new graphics and user experience. More to the point, we are learning about the new graphics architecture that drive the new Longhorn platform.

Ahhh, and it comes with slick demos.

Microsoft has finally admitted that the mechanisms for painting in Windows sucks. Which is why they wrote the new desktop composition engine (DCE). Its kinda kewl hearing about their approach. Each application basically now uses its own double buffering (the whole desktop is therefore double buffered) allowing for neat effects and huge speed increases. (3D texture rendering on the fly, FAST transparency, pixel shading etc)

Longhorn is going to have a new graphics programming library for application development. They are doing this via managed API or even through markup. You might have seen this on some other people's blogs. Its the new XAML stuff (Did you see that Hello World demo Don Box did?)

The presenter is really pumped about the fact they can now use those gaming cards to do kewl stuff on the desktop. I have had the same wish for years. Now only wish my laptop had a gaming video card! Course it will be to slow to run Longhorn anyways, so thats a moot point.

Speaking of performance and hardware, the hardware requirements are pretty high. I just heard that to run the new Aero Glass, it has a recommendation of 128 MB on the graphics card! I only have 192 MB (damn you Toshiba on your stupid design) in my entire laptop. *shutter*

Demo time! Lets just say the first demo.. well.. um.. didn't work. Hey, its a demo.

New person with a differnet laptop. We are now getting a sneak peak of the new Aero Glass experience. All I can say is "Wow, thats pretty". There are neat subtle animations that make the experience seem kinda kewl. And that is on top of the neat transparency affects to make the new "glass" look. Oops, he hung the demo on a logout/login action. Ahh, demo over now.. both demo machines toast. :(

All and all it looks sweet, but needs a LOT of work. Every one of their demos crashed or hung, but what I did see beforehard was pretty good. There is a lot of promise in what they are doing. And, this will in turn allow application developers to make a richer user experience. And thats a good thing.

Posted by SilverStr at November 13, 2003 10:16 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Oops, he hung the demo on a logout/login action. Ahh, demo over now.. both demo machines toast. :(

Ha ha Ha ha ha ha!

Sorry, but as Cat5 would say "that's classic" :)

Posted by: Arcterex at November 13, 2003 03:24 PM

Heh... how have things changed? Where'd that pic go of Gates plugging a scanner into a "Shiny new windows 98" computer during a Keynote, and BSOD?

Posted by: Wim at November 14, 2003 02:59 PM

I still don't know what to really think about XML-based programming languages like XAML, XSLT, BPML, etc. They have some realy value, sure, but it appears to come with a high level of complexility, extra bloat, high learning curves, and so on. What do you guys think?

Posted by: Wim at November 14, 2003 03:05 PM

I'm not sure what to make of it yet. I don't agree with the complexity. It looks like it will actually be EASIER to deploy widgets through this mechanism, but with lots of potential bloat.

I don't think anyone really can comment on this until we really see it.

Posted by: SilverStr at November 14, 2003 09:06 PM