Saturday, June 16, 2007

The Flavor of the Month is Acropolis

Now, after touting CAB for a few months, Microsoft has announced Acropolis.

A few months ago, the Microsoft DPE team came to me and tried to dissuade us from developing our .NET client framework in favor of using CAB. However, during those conversations, the word Acropolis came up a few times.

Now that Microsoft is touting Acropolis, what has become of CAB? Will this now be an officially supported framework (remember ObjectSpaces?). What about all of the financial service developers that committed to CAB? And, now you have some Microsoft people telling us that CAB was never officially supported by Microsoft, that it was developed by a small group of independent developers in some far off country that nobody ever heard of!

One thing about developing your own framework and making it a standard in the company is that it won't turn into a flavor-of-the-month entry. Goldman lead the way with OCEAN. Wachovia has OneSource, and Morgan Stanley has FidSharp and Concord. And we have ours. And, our companies tell our developers that they should use it.

No doubt that Acropolis will be "better" than CAB, and will have learned lessons and anti-patterns from CAB usage. Only, what will Microsoft come out with in another 6 months?

©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your post.. I think you are asking a question lots of people are thinking... We came out very, very early with the Acropolis project... It will undergo some changes as we get your feedback. If you like what you see in Acropolis I strongly encourage you to bet on CAB. CAB is by far the best way to prepare for acropolis and the CAB guys (and us) have committed to bring CAB customers forward to acropolis... I'd encourage you to not wait for acropolis but move forward with CAB but keep an eye on Acropolis and give us feedback through the cycle so it will be ready for you when it comes out.


--Brad Abrams, Acropolis Team, Microsoft
http://blogs.msdn.com/brada