I attended a Microsoft Technology roadshow yesterday (as part of my job) that spoke about .NET 3.0 (was WinFX), Windows Vista and Atlas (their ASP.NET answer to Ajax).

.NET 3.0 is an impressive technology, which allows you to write feature rich GUIs for Windows XP and Vista. For XP, the users will have to install the .NET 3.0 runtime but it comes as part of Vista. They herald it as a giant leap forward in GUI design for the windows. As the demonstrations continued, I thought "I could do that in Flash and DHTML" and I felt that by tying .NET 3.0 to the Windows platform for yet another generation was a mistake.

It was starkly aparent that there was no need for you to use Windows anymore, you could easily write you software using the Ajax technologies and host it through a web page, which is platform independent: run it one Windows, Linux or Apple computers.

Their answer to Ajax is weak and late: Atlas [link] Not actually part of .NET 3.0, it's a set of fledgling technologies that allow you to do less than free, independent libraries such as Dojo [link] Of course, you can't use Dojo with ASP as the compilation rejects it. Atlas, however, is not mature and has severe compatibility issues.

The rest of the web are moving away from installing software and I hoped that the .NET 3.0 framework would be platform independent and focussed on the web. Unfortunately, they're bloating it further with more application specific libraries that require you to have a Windows machine and I dare say Vista.