WinFX Beta 1 RC Discoveries: Part 2

To follow up to my previous blog entry, I found a new list of WinFX Beta 1 RC features. Tim Sneath has posted a sneak preview of his MSDN article entitled "A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the May Avalon Beta 1 RC Release". You can download the source document here: http://www.sneath.org/downloads/b1rcguide.doc

Here are some of the highlights from the document:

- Avalon now supports a new Express application model. It uses ClickOnce and sandboxing to create a safe execution environment. AIM (Application Impact Management) is the underlying security model that makes Express possible (you can learn more in this MSDN article). It's nice to see some of the PDC03 features finally emerging from the product. If you happen to be around at TechEd, be sure to drop by my Birds of a Feather entitled "Avalon/XAML vs WinForms".  We will definitely be discussing the impact of Express applications during the session.

- Metro documents: the current WinFX build supports Metro, a new document printing specification for the Longhorn client. By digging around a little, I found out that Metro is referred to as Document Packages in the WinFX SDK (the WinFX API namespace is System.IO.CompoundFile). The WinFX SDK has a few basic XAML samples. This is a feature I'll definitely have to find the time to test out. Another interesting tidbit I got from the article is that Metro doesn't require Avalon - it also works on Win32.

- Avalon now supports Adobe Compact Font Format (CFF). Roger Kay (an analyst from IDC) (and others) seem to think that Metro is a "PDF Killer". This will be a topic on the roster for the BOF. I think it's too early to tell but Microsoft has taken an interesting step incorporating Adobe specifications into WinFX. 

- Avalon Expander and Status Bar controls. The article contains a nice screenshot of the Status Bar control. It looks great!

I'll be posting later on about the changes in store for WinFX Beta 1 RC based on observations from the API and Tim Sneath's article.