Is Acropolis dead?

I’ve heard today that the Acropolis Project is somehow in hibernation!
It is a litle bit strange given all the initial buzz…
Can anyone confirm this rumour?

My First Acropolis Impressions

Today I’ve installed the Acropolis CTP1 and gave it a try. The first impression was great:

·         Shell design based on a wizard

·         A nice designer to make the plumbing (Services, Views, Connection points, etc)

Although, I was sort of disappointed with the associated documentation. It is up to 11 pages (including 2 walkthrough pages).

After implementing my first application, which consisted only of displaying an empty view, I went looking for a CAB feature comparison. I’ve started to get disappointed… The most prominent missing feature is Application Module support!!

Looking for some answers regarding some lack of features when comparing to CAB I’ve read that, although there are no official commitments, there are plans to support everything that CAB currently support.

I’ve google about confronting CAB and Acropolis, and I’ve found other people also worried about the actual Acropolis momentum. After the initial fuss it seems that we must lower down our expectations at least for now. I’ve found an interesting post that contains a in depth analysis of the current momentum of Acropolis, made by Ward Bell product manager for the DevForce .NET enterprise application development product from IdeaBlade.

From that post I’ve highlight the following sentences:

“this project appears to be in trouble and seems unlikely to deliver on schedule a year from now.”

“CAB seems to be appropriate only for projects with multiple modules, lots of screen, and complex application logic.”

“Acropolis intends to be far more approachable without sacrificing architectural integrity. We should be able to build simple Acropolis applications quickly and then grow them as the waves of requirements roll in – without having to scrap our initial implementation and re-build the foundation.”

“I see its CAB heritage. I see how it fills in some important gaps in CAB and will be easier to learn and easier to use than CAB. Acropolis could be truly great.”

“Acropolis is supposed to deliver in about a year.”

“newly released CTP1 is manifestly fragile. Every API is subject to change. There were no feature commitments. There were no architectural commitments. There was not even an inventory of project goals.”

“We were told to expect a complete “code reset” in the next few months. One observer called it a “code flush”.”

“I spoke to several industry veterans. They were almost scornful. Acropolis, in their view, was not even half baked.”

 “Everyone agrees – including the Acropolis team – that you should not use Acropolis today. Read about it? Absolutely. “Spike” with it? If you can afford the time. But I personally can’t afford to do more than poke at it with a long stick until it is more thoroughly baked.”

 So, to me, Acropolis seems to be very promising, but is still far fromwhat should be expected from the CAB successor.

More Common Acropolis Questions… By Brad Abrams

When are you shipping Acropolis?
As soon as it is ready Seriously, we are very early in the cycle here, we came out at Teched to get some early feedback and find out if we are going in the right direction. Acropolis will NOT ship with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5… Rather it will ship as an “option pack” style release that works super well with your Visual Studio 2008. Later we fully expect to fold in Acropolis into the next major release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.

Does Acropolis support WinForms?
Yes. While the UI aspects of acropolis (the themes, shell and transitions) are all built using WPF the base component model is UI tier agnostic. We believe it will be common to have “Parts” with “Views” in WinForms for example… Check out the RSSEagle example for more details on this. Further, it is certainly possible to build a full shell in WinForms…. If anyone is interested in working on a WinForms shell for acropolis let me know, we’d be happy to help!

By Brad Abrams – .Net Framework Team

Acropolis, the future of Smart Client… By Glenn Block

For some time people have been asking us what our plans are for supporting WPF within SCSF / CAB. In our last release we shipped support for hosting WPF Smart parts and Workspaces within a windows SCSF / CAB application. The next question many of our customer’s had is “Why didn’t you ship a WPF version of SCSF?”. Well this week at Tech-Ed, David Hill let the cat out of the bag, and it’s name is a project code-named “Acropolis“. I’ve put together a small FAQ below to help clarify some of the questions you might be having.

What is it?
Well Acropolis is a next generation platform for building the kinds of applications that you currently build with CAB. Make no mistake, Acropolis is not just another version of CAB. Acropolis takes the concepts of CAB to levels that folks in p&p might have never dreamed. With Acropolis you basically define your entire application in a very rich designer environment. Today you build smart parts which are basically user controls in a designer. You then manually wire up your parts to data and handle alot of the logic in code. Tomorrow you will build parts, behaviors, navigation, and even business logic (via Windows Workflow Foundation) all in a designer. You will even wire components and dependencies and define how they interact, all without writing or generating any code. (See the screen shot below)

How is this possible?
Acropolis leverages XAML behind the scenes to store the application definition. This means rather than spitting tons of code, Acropolis writes out XML. Similar to WPF and Workflow, Acropolis then takes this definition at runtime and wires everything together to create your resulting application.

What happens to SCSF when Acropolis ships? Will p&p still support it?
With the announcement of Acropolis, we currently have no further plans for SCSF releases. That being said, our customers should rest assured that we are not dropping support for SCSF. We will continue to support the forums, provide fixes and assist customers in their implementations. Additionally the newly launched SCSFContrib project is an ongoing community effort to extend CAB/SCSF which will continue. We will continue to look at ways to help customers build smart client applications including providing pure WPF guidance as well as guidance for building Acropolis applications.

I have an existing SCSF / CAB applicaiton, will you help me migrate to Acropolis?
Another yes. We will be working with David Hill and the Acropolis team to create a migration path for existing CAB/SCSF customers. This will include looking at hosting existing CAB components in Acropolis as well as prescriptive guidance. We are committed to helping our customers make this transiton.

My company is planning to develop a smart client application. Should I use SCSF or wait for Acropolis?
Acropolis is not going to ship for some time. Depending on your constraints, building in CAB/SCSF may be your best bet. As we mentioned above, we will be providing a migration path so that investments in CAB/SCSF are not wasted.

What about the future of WCSF and the client program in general?
WCSF is not affected by the Acropolis announcement. We are currently starting off on our next release. We are also looking above and beyond WCSF at other areas where we can help customers solve their challenges. This includes AJAX, Silverlight, building RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), SharePoint, dynamic language support etc.
We’re incredibly excited in p&p that our work in SCSF/CAB has been one of the catalysts for Acropolis. Our hat’s are off to the fabulous work David Hill, Kathy Kam and the Acropolis team are doing. This is not the end but a new beginning!

By Glenn Block – patterns & practices client program