Acropolis, CAB + WPF, PageFlow. What should I suggest to use?
I'm going to be confused. During the last three days we've seen:
- Acropolis: a set of tools to make it easier to develop UI based solutions. Seems to be a good idea to make able every developer to write code as markup, regardless of what's happining under the cover. One of the annunced features is workflow support and integration, in order to drive UI through workflows. Sounds good.
- PageFlow: today Matt Winkler (what a great guy!) annunced on his blog a new workflow template, called PageFlow, that allows to define workflow driven UI solutions, able to control Windows Form, ASP.NET and WPF UI independently. Sounds good too.
- CAB+WPF: yesterday have been announced the availability of CAB + WPF, i.e. a CAB / SCSF that support WPF. It's good, but in Acropolis overview session the speaker said that Acropolis, on a long time schedule, will replace SCSF. Also Gleen Block said the same thing on his blog. So CAB + WPF sounds good too, but how long it will be good and available?
To summarize we have three different solutions, somewhere overlapping, somewhere not, all coming from Microsoft, all apparently not fully supported because they're not boxed solutions, but "models" downloadable, like patterns and practices and software factories. What should I suggest to my customers to use?
Probably the best suggestion I can give to my customers, as I always do, is to take inspiration from all of these solutions and to build his own one, just to be sure that it will be supported on a long time schedule. On the other side it would be great to have a unique and affordable direction from Microsoft.