Chris Anderson had a great talk this afternoon about the application framework that's built into the Longhorn OS. He struggled through a couple demos, but nonetheless, got the points across in an almost all-demo talk.
After the marketing mandated slides, it was just code, code, code. Avalon, along with the Longhorn OS, provide some services to prevent having us all write the same plumbing code over and over. Some highlights:
- It feels a lot like the MFC application framework, where we don't write Main function any longer. The runtime and Avalon take care of WinMain, Main, etc. Call us on the Application::OnStartingUp event. (We override when necessary, to create windows, etc.)
- Window management is handled (if desired) by Avalon core. We can have the app quit when the main window is closed, when the last window is closed, or only when we call the close method.
- Services provided to do system tray notification. Very simple -- on a button click handler for example, just send a message to the tray, get the bubble notification.
- Running the EXE in a browser. Just a tweak in the XAML file, and the exe is hosted in the browser as a doc window. Navigation is done by the browser.