Not sure I really agree with Scoble here. I talk with the WinForms and Avalon folks a lot on a regular basis, and I think trying to pick a date in the future like "2012" or "2014" is a Bad Thing.

I spent many years working on WinForms and I love that technology dearly. I know almost all of the current development team on WinForms. I talk with them all the time, and I try to have a good grasp on their plans for the future.

I have been working on or with Avalon for a couple years now. I think I have a relatively good handle on what we are producing and how this maps to the WinForms technology.

The idea that people should adopt WinForms because Avalon is 8 years out is just ridiculous. People should adopt WinForms because it is a great development platform for creating smart client applications. People should adopt WinForms because it puts them in a great position for transitioning to Avalon when they choose to.

I think that customers should move to managed code because of all the things that Scoble mentions - it is our future platform, where we are investing in going forward, and the best platform for writing applications (productivity, power, etc.).

Developers know when they are ready to adopt new technologies based upon *their* customer's feedback. For some developers they will have customers that want Longhorn exploitive apps on day 1. For other developers they will have to wait. There are still people writing code (lots of it!) for mainframes, Win98, and OS/2.