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Avalon Preview Released for XP

Posted by michael on Fri Jan 14, 2005 06:20 PM
from the promised-land dept.
Microsoft Programming IT Technology
CliffH writes "For those that want to play with a preview release of Avalon (the November Community Technology Preview) and the SDK, head on over to this page and download to your heart's delight. It is 261MB+ and is already going slow so be warned."
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  • From the article...

    The company warns customers not to use it even on a primary development computer, with there being every likelihood of bugs and a pretty good chance developers will want to reinstall their system once they're done using the Avalon preview.

    If Microsoft thinks it's that buggy, I don't think I wanna see it yet.

    What really gets me down is the time I spent reading Charles Petzold's book on Win32 programming. 6 months of headscratching, all for nothing. I couldn't even sleep until the br

  • Actually, (Score:3, Funny)

    by krisp (59093) * on Friday January 14 2005, @06:21PM (#11368807) Homepage
    it's 255.3mb, and 261,450kb. And what u talkin bout willis? My download started at 1400KB/sec and trickled down to my 5mbit cap!
      • looks like firefox is going by the metric system then, dividing by 1000 and not 1024 for file sizes. They must participate in the same conspiracy the hard drive makers do!
  • Alright, lets see what my Radeon 9200 can do...

  • The nice thing about APIs is there's so many of em (Score:4, Insightful)

    by poot_rootbeer (188613) on Friday January 14 2005, @06:25PM (#11368845)
    "The goal is give developers a consistent set of APIs," or application programming interfaces, Montgomery said.

    And they're doing this by adding ANOTHER set of graphics APIs to Windows, to complement the ones we have now, and the ones we had five years ago, and the ones we had five years before that, and the ones we had five years before THAT?

    I don't get it.

    • Re:The nice thing about APIs is there's so many of (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bonch (38532) on Friday January 14 2005, @06:30PM (#11368894)
      Simple answer: No.

      It's all going .NET with the new technologies based on that. They're ditching Win32, though there will be binary compatibility for older apps. The kernel will remain mostly unchanged; it's the overlying technologies that are being rewritten. Not only will this make things much safer (.NET is garbage-collected, type-safe, etc.), but it allows for much easier development (compare MFC to, say, WinForms).

      Hate Microsoft or not, they're taking a step in the right direction with Longhorn by replacing all that "cruft" (my favorite term for such things). Of course, I still think Apple will just come out with something even better with Longhorn, but at the least, I'll be happy having the majority of people getting their computers into a managed memory environment where I don't have to worry as much about an app taking things down.

      • Reaon for Longhorn delay (Score:5, Funny)

        by bstadil (7110) on Friday January 14 2005, @06:42PM (#11369001) Homepage
        .NET is garbage-collected,

        I guess this is why Longhorn keeps on slipping. Maybe they should let a little code slip through so as not to jeopardize the Duke Nukem Forever bundling agreement.

      • Of course, I still think Apple will just come out with something even better

        Where? How? There is nothing on Apple's roadmap. Objective-C is neither garbage collected nor type-safe, yet it is still what Apple is pushing. And while Apple kind of inherited a scalable graphics engine and toolkit with NeXTStep, that is technology from the 1980's; their competitors are designing with the benefit of hindsight and with knowledge of today's needs and requirements.

        The people most likely to come out with someth
        • Objective-C is neither garbage collected nor type-safe, yet it is still what Apple is pushing.

          Objective-C is dynamically typed, and therefore is by definition type-safe. It is also garbage collected, although it is both reference counted and manual. But I know what you meant. You meant it isn't type-checked at compile time and automatically garbage collected. Which like any language feature debate has both pros and cons. Neither are key issues that you can judge the superiority of a whole OS on.

          Appl

      • ".NET is garbage-collected"

        Duh, learn your punctuation! It should be ".NET is garbage, collected". :)

    • Re:The nice thing about APIs is there's so many of (Score:4, Interesting)

      by omicronish (750174) on Friday January 14 2005, @09:42PM (#11370588)

      And they're doing this by adding ANOTHER set of graphics APIs to Windows, to complement the ones we have now, and the ones we had five years ago, and the ones we had five years before that, and the ones we had five years before THAT?

      That may be true in the high performance DirectX area (D3D and DDraw revisions frequently made large changes to the API), but in the normal application area we've been stuck with GDI since Windows was conceived. Only relatively recently has GDI+ come into play, although at a high level it's simply an OO wrapper around GDI, and likewise, MFC graphics classes are also GDI wrappers. At the core, Windows basically supports GDI for normal applications and DirectDraw/Direct3D for high performane graphics, and so the situation then isn't as complex as you make it to be. GDI itself currently is very underpowered when you compare it to things the Mac OS can do, so it makes sense to finally revise the API after 20 years of usage.

      I can't possibly describe Avalon's capabilities here, but as a simple example, in GDI you draw rectangles, lines, etc., whereas in Avalon you define visual objects and Avalon automatically renders them as needed. In computer games and other applications that need a deeper level of control Avalon won't be that appropriate (although IIRC you can do simple 3D in Avalon), but for normal applications I think it'll be awesome. Death to GDI!

      Of course after rereading my post it does seem like Windows has a bunch of graphics APIs. Just remember that all that application-side ones are reducible to the ancient and horribly underpowered GDI.

  • Here comes the bashing... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bonch (38532) on Friday January 14 2005, @06:26PM (#11368856)
    Instead of discussing the technology (which is actually pretty cool...they do have smart engineers at Microsoft), I have a feeling this will be a bunch of +5 Funny Microsoft-bash posts.

    One third referencing some obscure GUI from the past where something almost like this has been done already, another third referencing some future project not released yet doing the same, and the rest a bunch of +5 Funny "jokes" rehashing old Microsoft jokes from the last eight years. Okay, I'm generalizing, but that's also what people will be doing about this. :)

    Seriously, it looks like interesting stuff, and I can't wait to not only develop with it, but develop with the competing technologies that will also spring up as a result.

    Oh, and for the record, before people say it--OS X does use the 3D card, but only for fast blitting. It is still 2D. Not actual 3D acceleration using hardware triangles like this, where you're dealing with a camera viewport and using meshes.

    • Re:Here comes the bashing... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ZiZ (564727) * on Friday January 14 2005, @06:33PM (#11368927) Homepage
      Oh, and for the record, before people say it--OS X does use the 3D card, but only for fast blitting. It is still 2D. Not actual 3D acceleration using hardware triangles like this, where you're dealing with a camera viewport and using meshes.

      Speaking of this, I'd love to see a super-bloody-fast hardware accelerated 2D video card, with code and drivers optimized for doing 2D operations - skip the 3D stuff, but give me 2D layers, in-card pixel-perfect collision detection, et cetera, et cetera. You could expect it to be at a reasonable price, it would be /very/ useful for desktop, presentation, and even 2D gaming...and it would be far simpler to program efficiently.

      But regardless of that, parent has a solid point.

      Imagine if your windowing system dealt with windows-in-the-front merely by telling your graphics card 'this goes to the front'. Think how nice it would be to never have to manually rotate and scale images for display, but know that your desktop would know how to deal with it if you asked it to nicely. Picture hardware-accelerated mouse cursors that can be as dynamic and beautiful as software-rendered mouse cursors. If you like that sort of thing, anyway.

      • 3d cards make for hell of 2d accelerators.

        first 3d cards were JUST 2d accelerators for most stuff anyways, you would only draw zbuffered triangles(textured, shaded...) with them.

        the normal 3d cards you see today are just perfect for that and _very_ affordable, windows just can't take much of advantage of it now(longhorn is intended to have a mode that would take advantage of it).

        (mac osx takes use of the fast funky drawing for desktop stuff and effects, for one)

        besides, there's a whole lot of "2d accele

      • Re:Here comes the bashing... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by blacklite001 (453622) on Friday January 14 2005, @07:02PM (#11369213)
        Well, they don't have all those bells and whistles, but Matrox [matrox.com] has been concentrating on solid 2D performance for years now, and for everyday 2D applications they (at least, last time I checked) consistently outperform the massively expensive 3D cards.

    • Re:Here comes the bashing... (Score:4, Funny)

      by DrCode (95839) on Friday January 14 2005, @06:37PM (#11368959)
      I'm not trying to be funny. But every time I step on a nail, it hurts. So I've learned to avoid stepping on nails, even though there might be one somewhere that will feel good when it pierces my foot.

      Similarly, every version of Windows I've used hurts (and the pain lasts much longer than that from the nail).

    • Re:Here comes the bashing... (Score:5, Funny)

      by johannesg (664142) on Friday January 14 2005, @06:39PM (#11368969)
      Instead of discussing the technology (which is actually pretty cool...they do have smart engineers at Microsoft), I have a feeling this will be a bunch of +5 Funny Microsoft-bash posts. One third referencing some obscure GUI from the past where something almost like this has been done already, another third referencing some future project not released yet doing the same, and the rest a bunch of +5 Funny "jokes" rehashing old Microsoft jokes from the last eight years...

      ...and one idiot who thinks he can stave off all that by posting his insanely smart prediction about it.

    • ...I have a feeling this will be a bunch of +5 Funny Microsoft-bash posts.

      That isn't the point as I see it.

      I don't know if Microsoft is the largest software company or just the most profitable, but their economic momentum is what many critics object to. What you perceive as craping and whinging (and there is some of that too) is instead, as we see it, our job as consumers. We are fulfilling our obligations to make our demands known ("Market Forces" and all that).

      I use Linux two reasons:

      1) it is cool te
  • From TFA:
    The main difference is that newer graphics drivers in Longhorn allow for better performance and newer hardware. With Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, users might see slower performance, fewer shades of gray or less 3D animation, Montgomery said.

    As we've already learned [slashdot.org], Longhorn is going to be graphically intensive (just what you want for the kernel of a server OS, isn't it?). While I agree with the statement in that Longhorn may very well have drivers more appropriate for doing the things t

    • Re:Graphics and Avalon... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Thundersnatch (671481) on Friday January 14 2005, @06:43PM (#11369008) Journal
      just what you want for the kernel of a server OS, isn't it?

      Why in hell does every Linux fanboy assume that all Windows processes run in kernel mode? Even Windows Explorer on NT4/Win2k/XP/2003 runs in user space, buddy.

      All of this UI stuff wil run in user space, with the exception of the actual video device driver code (which is done for performance). Windows video device drivers that are WHQL certified are typically rock solid and stable for general non-gaming use.

      Anyway, you can run GUI-less windows servers on 2003 today. And even if you do choose to use the GUI shell for administering a Windows server, when you log out, the processes for explorer.exe and pretty much everything else GUI are completely stopped (only GINA, the graphical login prompt, remains). You can verify this with any number of Windows remote administration tools.

      Finally, you can bet that the "eye candy" will be turned off by default on the server versions of longhorn, just as it is on Windows Server 2003 (which uses the same Luna GUI as XP, with almost all the animation/transparency/etc. options turned off).

      • Why in hell does every Linux fanboy assume that all Windows processes run in kernel mode?
        Upon what information are you basing your assessment here? Parent said nothing about Linux.
      • "Anyway, you can run GUI-less windows servers on 2003 today. And even if you do choose to use the GUI shell for administering a Windows server ..."

        This deserves a "Why does every MS apologist insist that Windows can be run without a GUI?"

        Or, more accurately, "Why does every MS apologist insist that their half-dozen Resource Kit utilities adds up to Remote Administration Without a GUI?"

  • So why not... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Sanity (1431) on Friday January 14 2005, @06:28PM (#11368880) Homepage Journal
    ..download through Dijjer [dijjer.org]?

  • Screenshots (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Szentigrade (790685) on Friday January 14 2005, @06:30PM (#11368895)
    I don't know about the rest of you but i would rather bypass downloading a 250MB file and would just like to see some interesting screenshots.

  • Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nik13 (837926) on Friday January 14 2005, @06:51PM (#11369075) Homepage
    I wonder if it's really that graphic intensive (not gonna bother downloading it yet though). Seeing things like this get added to XP and things like WinFS taken out of LH, it's making it less and less attractive to ever upgrade to LH. For the first time in my life, I feel like either
    1) lots of people will stick to XP, or
    2) a lot of people will move on to linux instead.

    I've been using pretty only windows in the last few years (ever since I got rid of my atari 1040 and older stuff), coding for it and all... But I'm really loosing interest in the "new" stuff they come out with (like, I got all the themes and such crap all off - "classic" look). It just seems more bloated, and they're trying to put some "nice" (they think it is, anyways) GUI so lusers aren't scared anymore, when in fact, I find it's becoming quite a mess - and an overly bloated one, that is.

    I've tried knoppix 3.7 a couple days ago, and I must say it's a VERY viable option for most stuff. Yes, I had a few problems (enabling spdif out on sb lives, xmms wouldn't play mp3's off smb and small things), and it won't run all my usual apps (photoshop, ms office...), but I was very surprised nonetheless. There were some compilers in there, a CAD program (shocked me), OO loaded slow (of course) but it wasn't half bad... It was really easy to pick up and find everything.

    Most people I know all love their windows/autocad/photoshop/etc (not that they know how to use it) - but that's mostly because they didn't pay the hefty price tag, but this does the most part, for free (legit). I'm starting to seriously consider "doing the switch", at least on one PC to give it a good try.

    I think LH itself is what will make the most people switch to linux (especially combined with all the spyware and other crap most lusers have been crippled with lately). I only see bad in LH - and I'm mostly known as a M$-fanboy... But that's changing lately. I've been starting to convert myself to more open, portable (and perhaps more stable/secure) options (like using LAMP instead of ASP or ASP.Net/IIS/SQL Server like we use at work and such) and I'm liking it, a lot (cheap to host, too). Now if I could find a replacement for most apps (including VS.Net), I think I'd be sold.

    To me, that MS-world is just unsustainable. Everybody I know only use it because they can use pirated everything for free. I don't think I know anyone who wants to - or can afford to buy a new windows, office, and everything else license every year (or even for every second version - and who wants to stick to old soft?). I don't mind paying a minimal fee for a good distro or such, but what I use daily on a win box cost me over a few months' salary... How much longer can we keep up with this dream of being afford to use all these apps that cost hundreds of $? (yes, I know, big corps can afford it... whatever).
            • not as far as i know, no, but i might not have found that feature yet (i used to program in VB5 and have that functionality before i switched to linux completely and ive just started to try to get to grips with _basic_ c++).

              If your programming in C++/delphi, kylix (made by borland but its open source, not sure of the license) has that functionality iirc.

              have a look at this website (its for gentoo, but there will be packages available for other distro's if you google)
              http://www.gentoo-portage.com/dev-util
  • It is 261MB+ and is already going slow so be warned.

    Fortunately, there's no explanation of what the hell "Avalon" is in the text so that ought to help with the download performance. Had someone actually known what the hell you were so excited about, more people would try to download the software.

    Good strategy. It's like those morons who put the important part of their comments in the subject line and continue on to their message. I miss important bits of the message since I do not scan for the subjects so miss out on the point they are attempting to make. It sure makes life easier for the reader if we don't know what is going on and do not have to actually get interested in the article or comment enough to read it.

    There. Rant over. I feel better now.

    Thanks

  • Avalon vs Quartz (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jstheriault (136211) on Friday January 14 2005, @07:10PM (#11369284) Journal
    From what I gather, Avalon is Microsoft's version of Quartz. Has anyone compared the two in terms of capabilities, ease of programming etc.?

    • Re:Avalon vs Quartz (Score:4, Informative)

      by caseih (160668) on Friday January 14 2005, @09:27PM (#11370500)
      Avalon is much more advanced than Quartz is currently. Avalon is a vector-based drawing API. Quartz, although it looks smooth, is really bitmapped, although not for long. Quartz will gain true vector capabilities very soon I'm sure, probably before longhorn ships.

        • Re:Avalon vs Quartz (Score:4, Informative)

          by caseih (160668) on Saturday January 15 2005, @02:36AM (#11371838)
          While you are right about the API being a path-based and vector-based API, everything is rendered to a bitmap that is composited on the screen. See http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/3368 7

          relevant quote:
          Quartz uses composition, but despite the fact that it also has extensive support for vector drawing, there is a big limitation: there is no vector-level retention - as I understand it the composition is done *after* the rasterization of the vector imagery. The vector support in Mac OS X actually works in pretty much exactly the same way as GDI+ does in current versions of Windows, and is not integrated into the composition engine.

          Compare this with Avalon, which uses vector-level retention as part of its composition model, and can interleave multiple transform and rasterization steps as a result. (It can also retain bitmaps as an optimization, but it always retains vector information too.) This enables transforms to be integrated with the composition engine. Transforms in Quartz are done much more like current versions of Windows handle them - they are dealt with at the level of a drawing context when the application generates its imagery. (At least that's how I've always seen it done. If you can point me at an example that shows transformations at the composition level rather than the drawing level in Quartz, I'd be very interested to see that.)
        • Yes the API is path-based, but once the paths are rendered to a bitmap and then composited on the screen it is finished. Any scaling at that point is done on a bitmap level (for example the zoomable icons). Avalon preserves the paths and vectors all the way into the composite layer so things can be warped and scaled without having to have the program do a redraw. Currently Quartz forces the app to create the paths all over again every time the window is redrawn or if the display was to be suddenly scaled

  • Am i the only one not excited over this? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lisandro (799651) on Friday January 14 2005, @07:17PM (#11369332)
    After all i've read and seen [msdn.com] about Avalon, i still don't get what the fuzz is all about. Yes, it looks flashy, but at the expense of unreasonable processing power (don't forget this is an integral part of the Longhorn kernel). And i consider myself a sucker for eye-candy.

    I know it's not comparable, because we're talking windows, but Enlightenment 0.17 [htttp] will (hopefully) do everything Avalon does, and pretty much everything new Longhorn does as well. Just check the information on the e17 foundation libraries. Amazing stuff.

    • Re:Am i the only one not excited over this? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RzUpAnmsCwrds (262647) on Friday January 14 2005, @10:22PM (#11370777)
      "but at the expense of unreasonable processing power"

      Not at all. Avalon makes heavy use of DX9 shaders to offload the work to the GPU.

      Unlike Quartz Extreme, which only uses the GPU for compositing, Avalon offloads nearly all GUI operations to the GPU.

      "don't forget this is an integral part of the Longhorn kernel"

      Nope. It's user-land.

      "but Enlightenment 0.17 will (hopefully) do everything Avalon does"

      No, it won't. Most Linux apps are QT-based or GTK-based, meaning that Enlightenment is little more than a window manager. Unless we can switch a large number of Linux apps to the e17 foundation libraries (which, if I understand correctly, aren't meant to be a comprehensive toolkit like QT or GTK), e17 won't have the abilities of Avalon.

      I am psyched about Avalon. Here's why:

      - Pixel independance. Finally, Windows users will be able to choose whatever resolution they want and ajust the text (and icons/controls/other stuff) to a size they are comfortable with.

      - 3D acceleration. Avalon enables lots of eye candy, and it does so without taking a whole lot of CPU time. In Microsoft demos, Avalon can animate 100s of translucent videos at full framerate without going above 5% CPU load.

      - 3D integrated. Avalon makes 3D an integral part of the GUI. There's no need for complex APIs or dirty hacks to implement 3D functionality. Things like Excel graphs instantly get the benefits of 3D acceleration.
      • "No, it won't. Most Linux apps are QT-based or GTK-based, meaning that Enlightenment is little more than a window manager. Unless we can switch a large number of Linux apps to the e17 foundation libraries (which, if I understand correctly, aren't meant to be a comprehensive toolkit like QT or GTK), e17 won't have the abilities of Avalon.

        Actually, the reason i'm so excited over e17 is not much the window mananger but the underlying libraries. Much like the e16 libraries (imlib2 and such), their usabilit

    • Sorry, I know I'm answering to a flamebait, ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DrYak (748999) on Friday January 14 2005, @09:48PM (#11370618) Homepage
      I know I shouldn't, but here are a few things I would like to tell :
      This is, I think, the typical "I-Tried-Installing-Linux-2-Years-Ago, Tried-Playing-with-it-for-10minute, And-found-it-suckz-because-none-of-my-1337-windows -apps-runs-on-it" user.
      The user only remember a few surface stuff he noticed 5 years ago and doesn't stop complaining about them.

      Most notably in the "A Decade Later ..." :

      So far, Linux has made inroads in replacing old UNIX servers, just as BSD has

      They both also succeeded replacing Windows-based server whose administrator got fed up with microsoft's products.
      We see more Windows-to-Linux thant Linux-to-Windows server migration.
      Linux and BSD are also used a lot in academics.
      And Linux IS used on Dekstop even if it isn't as visible as it's other uses.

      We're still using XFree86

      ... X.org, as pointed by other slashdotters...

      which just recently gained the ability to change its own screen resolution without requiring a configuration file edit and restar

      [CTRL] [ALT] [+] and [CTRL] [ALT] [-] since I installed my first distribution.
      (You should have paid more attention to the manual).
      Meanwhile, you had to use some hack to avoid rebooting Windows 95 in order the effect to take place...

      . Desktop environments like KDE and GNOME are more interesting in adding more buttons and sidebars rather than implementing a universal API library for development

      Then FreeDesktop.org [freedesktop.org] doesn't exist, I think...

      including binary installation/uninstallation

      It's not desktop's purpose to implement installations. (Just like it's not DirectX's job either).

      I think it's the exact opposite.
      Almost all linux distributions have a package managment system (YaST, apt-get, emerge, drakrpm, yum ...)
      Unless you want to use new version of a sfotware that isn't available yet in your distribution, you got a SINGLE place to uninstall unneeded packages, install new softwares that are optimised for YOUR distribution, and you can easily get updates for them.

      Compare to windows where you have your Installation CD, Windows Update, separate installer that you must download from separate website for each software you want.
      You must track updates alone for every single software you installed (do you remembre that small plug-in you installed 6 months ago in WinAmp and for which there's now a patch against a buffer overflow ?)

      I really think PC providers (like Dell, HP, ...) should watch and learn. They could win a lot of clients if they had a single point for software acquisition/update like this...

      a universal graphics/sound library for games

      There's not only one, but a few of them.
      Notable one :
      - OpenGL : So good for 3D graphics that it's also used under Windows for games like thoses from ID software.
      - SDL : 2D GFX/Audio library that is also used by windows programms (like emulators).

      and clear interface design that doesn't borrow from Windows while complaining about it. KDE currently implements an integrated file browser/net browser, start menu, taskbar, and more. All popular Windows features

      Most of the base of the design is borrowed from older Unices which where available long time before Windows.
      KDE got most of them from the begining.

      Even the parts that are inspired by Windows are much more configurable than windows.

      Mono, currently the most promising prospect for a true future desktop Linux, is an implementation of Microsoft technologies.

      1. Mono is not the only V

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