What is Avalon/Aero?

By tomwarren
in The Fast Ring (Insider Previews)

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 3 months later...
Neowinian

Naser

Posted
Posted

One thing a lot of people keep saying is that it will have like 3D Desktop & that it will start showing up from Beta-2 & supposedly thats what Avalon is.

I did try Beta-1 but transperency effects, the minimizing & maximizing effects is not something i really dig for an O.S that been taking forever. Heck a lot of these effects can be done in XP, maybe not as good,but can be done.

My question is: Will it have what people say it will, like for example "Project looking Glass" from Sun Java,or something similar?

3D Desktop

Thanx

  • 1 month later...
  • 3 months later...
Grand Master

Malisk

Posted
Posted (edited)

I'd just like to debunk two common misconceptions here. :)

Will Beta 2 or other upcoming pre-RTM releases of Vista use a dramatically improved UI?

No. The latest 5270 UI we've seen at the time of writing this will only see minor tweaks done to it. Source.

Do Vista's UI use Avalon/WPF? Do DWM use Avalon?

By now, the 5xxx builds seem to show that the Explorer and rest of Vista UI won't use Avalon/WPF.

There seem to be a lot of confusion going on here, especially about the 3D effects we're seeing some say are implemented using Avalon, but in reality it's just the DWM doing this, and the DWM isn't even a .NET component. The DWM is hardware accelerating things by using Direct3D without going through Avalon.

This seem to have been a different story (or at least different plans) in the 4xxx builds with much grander plans for UI implementations in Avalon. The post by e.g. Renfrew-guy above was probably quite true -- at the time (June 2004).

Avalon/WPF seem to mostly be present in Vista for third party developers to use now, and possibly upcoming Microsoft applications.

Finally, "Aero" doesn't use Avalon, since it's mostly the DWM support with its effects + a new theme.

However, note that nothing of this contradicts what was said in the first post in this thread. Avalon is still likely to be present, assuming the WinFX Runtime is included with the Vista RTM, along with all the benefits it provides to applications written to use this API.

Edited by Jugalator
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