Programming Windows: Hello Again, Windows Forms (Premium)

In researching the Longhorn-era WinFX technologies that will soon enter this story, it occurred to me that I needed to take a step back and touch on an important, related topic. And that will require another short side-trip into some source code.

As you may know, we were in Mexico recently, and I spent a lot of time during those two-plus weeks writing about and researching topics for the Programming Windows series. It’s hard not to be obsessive about this topic: the period of time I’m writing about now---the early 2000s---was the most exciting time to be a Windows enthusiast, culminating with the wild all-time high of the Longhorn reveal at PDC in October 2003.

As you might imagine, I often split my time between the topics I’m currently writing for the series and the topics that are just over the horizon. And while we were away, I started diving in and out of materials related to the Longhorn 2003 reveal. Among them, the PDC keynotes from that year and the prior two shows, from 2000 and 2001. Which I have watched, and read the transcripts from, again and again and again.

Most are likely familiar with the Bill Gates keynote from PDC 2003, where he brought out Hillel Cooperman to demonstrate the proposed Longhorn user interface. And I will certainly be writing about that, and in-depth. But fewer people are probably as familiar with the next keynote, which featured Windows lead Jim Allchin and two high-profile and influential Microsoft engineers, Don Box and Chris Anderson, who wrote Longhorn code, live, on-stage.

Riding on a bumpy bus ride from Mexico City to Puebla for a long weekend a few weeks back, I watched, mesmerized, as Box and Anderson used plain text editors, and not Visual Studio, to write their application code and then compile it from the command line. And I was reminded, instantly, by my reaction to this when it happened live in front of me. I didn’t understand what they were doing---I had pretty much stopped writing software code at the dawn of the .NET era---and I most certainly didn’t understand the declarative, XAML-based user interfaces they created. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to XAML soon enough too.)

But in the years since, I’ve become much more familiar with .NET-era technologies, including C#, XAML, and the various Windows app frameworks that Microsoft has released in the intervening 20+ years. I’ve written four versions of my .NETpad app using mostly C# (one version in Visual Basic) and the .NET Framework. And two of the four involve declarative, XAML-based user interfaces. And so watching Box and Anderson this year, with fresh eyes, I suddenly realized a few things.

First, I now understand what they were doing in a way that I did not over 20 years ago.

Second, I knew I could recreate this code, I was sure of it, using the modern and released versions of the technologies they were demonstrating publicly for the first time that day. Over time, WinFX turned into another version of the .NE...

Gain unlimited access to Premium articles.

With technology shaping our everyday lives, how could we not dig deeper?

Thurrott Premium delivers an honest and thorough perspective about the technologies we use and rely on everyday. Discover deeper content as a Premium member.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC