The future of Acropolis

Few months back I tried the new client framework Acropolis and was pretty surprised by the features it offered. However I also noticed that it was far from being a complete solution What did you expect from a CTP? I hear you say and that’s pretty much what I was thinking back then.

It’s been a while since I tried it out and today I thought it would be a nice idea to check up on what the acropolis team at Microsoft has been doing. Well, there’s some bad news and some good news. The bad news is they stopped working on acropolis. The good news however is that they are going to integrate the code into the .NET framework and build a whole new client framework from scratch. It’s pretty clear they’ve learned a lot over the past few months/years. And according to the site they are going to use the ideas from both acropolis and CAB (Composite Application Block) to create a new framework that’s better.

I personally feel that it’s a good thing to have a framework for windows client, but I’m a bit disappointed that they didn’t continue work on acropolis in the same way they were doing the last few months. Then again I should not be screaming before something really happened, because it could be well possible that they are releasing a new CTP for the new client framework within months (Pure speculation ofcourse, I can’t see in the agenda’s of the Microsoft people ;P).

There’s an interesting blog article on software factories that links to this one: http://blogs.msdn.com/gblock/archive/2007/10/26/wpf-composite-client-guidance-it-s-coming.aspx