Well, the news is out now, and everyone is starting to talk about it.

Personally, I am totally excited about this. For the past couple weeks we’ve been working out what this means for Avalon, and so far it is shaping up to look pretty good.

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Longhorn in 2006, with a firm commitment from management, is a great thing. Getting more components of WinFX running on more platforms is a great thing. Indigo was already on this plan, and I’m happy to have Avalon on that plan also. We listened to developers, and they all resoundingly told us that more of WinFX needed to be downlevel, so we are doing it. WinFS was a big bet, and still is, the fact that it will be a bit later doesn’t lessen the importance or commitment to it.
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But what does this really mean to Avalon?

Since that is the team I work on, it’s really the only thing that I feel informed enough about to talk about… Let me try to answer what I think will be the most common questions (for the official FAQ, check out WinFX on down-level):

1. How can Avalon run on XP, I thought you said it required Longhorn?
Probably the deepest dependency Avalon has on Longhorn is in the new display driver technology. The DX stack is largely designed for a single application to have absolute control over the video card at a time (think full screen gaming). To really do multiple 3D applications running simultaneously with a composited desktop, we needed to make the GPU a shared resource. In the new Longhorn Display Driver Model (LDDM) we were introducing technology for resource virtualization and scheduling support on the GPU. Without this, we have some tough problems to solve, not intractable problems, but tough. Realistically though, there will be some limitations to what we can do on XP – I just don’t have that complete list today.

2. What does this mean for developers?
Obviously the availability of Avalon for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, in addition to Longhorn, will make it viable for a lot more developers to begin developing applications using Avalon. This is really a large part of our reason for wanting to move downlevel.

3. Is this why you haven’t been blogging for a while?
Partially, planning for this has been occupying a lot of my time… hopefully I can get back to blogging more regularly!

4. Does this announcement change your sump pump plans?
No. Unfortunately my sump pump doesn’t run Windows XP today, so this will not change my plans.

5. Will <insert your favorite feature /> be in the Windows XP version of Avalon?
I can’t say at this point. As with any product as we push towards the release date the feature set will change (new features from customer requests, features cut for one reason or another).

6. What does this mean for WinForms development?
I love WinForms. I worked on WinForms for years, and I still believe it is the best way to build smart client applications today. WinForms will continue to be the way to build smart client applications for the next several years, even after WinFX is released. WinForms is available on more platforms (Win9X, Win2K, etc.) and has a more mature control set and tools story. We are working hard on a great story for migration and interop between WinForms and Avalon.

7. I read in <insert news site /> that Avalon is cut, is that true?
No. We are absolutely committed to delivering Avalon, and from everything I’ve been told, heard, and am planning - we will ship it!

8. Will Avalon have a visual designer?
We are working on our tools plan, but I don’t have anything to announce today.

9. Does this change how your team is working?
Our team is generally excited by this plan, with change there is always some trepidation, but almost everyone is jazzed about being about to deliver more value to more customers. The team is probably going to shift their primary development platform to Windows XP for the next several months, but we will still have Longhorn as a primary test platform. This new plan gives us a lot of clarity about what we are delivering. Otherwise, not much else changes - our core mission of "best of the web, best of Windows" remains unchanged and our philosophy of unifying documents, ui, and media remains unchanged.

I can’t wait to get this stuff into developer’s hands. The fact that I can now ship this stuff to a large set of customers makes me super excited. This is exactly what developers have been asking us for, and now we are able to give it to them!