Visual presentation

A whole crop of software reviewers has entirely missed the point about Vista's new Aero interface and Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF, a.k.a. "Avalon") graphics subsystem.

Aero has often been dismissed as so much eye candy, as frivolously non-functional adornment, as pretty things to dress up the user interface. The same people who rant endlessly about whether the graphical menu should move vertically or horizontally are the ones who dismiss the power Avalon represents to transform Windows applications of the future. It's not about what Microsoft is doing with the Vista interface, it's about what all that power in the hands of application designers and developers could mean with your software.

The Aero interface, and the application user interfaces that take full advantage of WPF in the future, can take advantage of these graphical effects: 2D, 3D, 3D animation, effortless scaling, vector-based text and shape rendering and motion, transparency, blurring, shadows in motion, object movements and a lot more. Put in simpler terms, Microsoft is borrowing heavily on the graphics horsepower previously only found on high-end gaming machines and enabling it as part of the operating system's core.

To go along with internal support for full-fledged 3D, WPF also supports a new extensible application markup language, XAML, that should make it much easier for application designers to try out and create user interfaces for their applications that tie in with the programmatic functionality being created by their programmers.