The Windows "desktop environment" these days is WCF. (Win Forms is deprecated.) WCF is a chameleon that can be hosted either on the desktop or in ASP.NET by Silverlight. None of these is dependent on the Win API. Rather, they are dependent on the .NET Framework which admittedly is currenty still implemented on the Win API. But there is no reason it will be in the future, and indeed there has been rampant speculation that it won't be in a future release, possibly as soon as Windows 8. The reality, though, is that no major new development initiatives use the "desktop environment" anymore. Everything these days is web, web, web, and cloud, cloud, cloud.
Microsoft will continue to support WinXP virtualization exactly until they calculate that depriving their users of it will cost them less than continuing to support it. On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 1:02 PM, David W. Fenton <lists.fin...@dfenton.com>wrote: > On 27 Feb 2011 at 22:37, Robert Patterson wrote: > > > It's not that Rosetta per se bogs down the system. It's that > > continuing to support it means using up valuable development and > > testing resources verifying that it continues to function correctly > > with all the changes going on around it. Apple has clearly done the > > calculation and figured it is more cost effective for them to drop > > Rosetta than expend the effort to continue to support it. Given the > > cost of constant regression testing, I can't say I really blame them. > > Is the reason that MS has reached a different conclusion because of > the difference in size between the two companies? > > All of this could be accomplished with a virtual machine emulation > layer, seems to me. Of course, it's not nearly as complicated as what > Parallels does to run Windows (since it's running on Intel for both > the host and guest OS). > > I am just mystified as to why Apple thinks this is an insignificant > enough issue that they don't provide some kind of backward > compatibility option. Or, failing that from Apple itself, why > somebody else doesn't step up and build it. > > -- > David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com > David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ > > _______________________________________________ > Finale mailing list > Finale@shsu.edu > http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale > _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
