[marshray]

Right, and when they told us Active Desktop was the future of the Windows UI and we should bet the success of our applications on it some of us knew to ignore it back then too.

The lesson here for developers is not to do what MSDN advises you to do. Look at what MS is actually doing for its own application development. In some cases, like Office, that even means having a portable codebase.

[browniepoints]

Very good point. But Microsoft has made a STRONG commitment to declarative UIs starting with WPF continuing with Silverlight. Windows Phone 7 was a total reboot of their mobile platform centered around Silverlight. There's no pussyfooting when it comes to Windows 8. They're severing the ties and going all in.

[marshray]

Microsoft has made a STRONG commitment to declarative UIs starting with WPF continuing with Silverlight.

What does that even mean? Talk is cheap, show me the code.

If a DLL shipped in Vista, I can expect it will be available in Windows 8. So I might consider using it (for app code that is intended to be Windows-only) once none of my customers are running anything earlier than Vista, or maybe after MS stops providing security fixes. We recently dropped support for Win2k for example.

So new APIs, even for old ideas, aren't usually interesting to me. Wake me up in 5-10 years if you're still committed to it then.

Is this one of those considerations that cloud computing (e.g. Azure) is somehow going to make go away?

[browniepoints]

Again, I wasn't targeting this at people still supporting XP and the like. Unlike WPF, I don't see Microsoft back-porting DirectUI especially not to XP. My article was targeted at the people up in arms about the death of Silverlight.