With Vista, the latest version of Windows, arriving, you, as a developer, may be faced with learning a new set of technologies. You've probably heard many of the terms and acronyms (Windows Presentation Foundation, WinFX, and all that). But what does it all mean? And what do you need to move ahead in your development and career? Let's take a look at what Vista has to offer in terms of development. (I'm assuming in this article that you're familiar with at least the basics of .NET 2.0.)

The Overall Picture

From a developer's standpoint, Vista consists of the Win32 API as well as .NET version 3.0. (Some people use the term managed for the .NET portion, and unmanaged for the Win32 portion.) Although you are free to use the Win32 API and write code in C++ that calls into the operating system, Microsoft is encouraging us all to instead program under NET. (And one piece of good news is that .NET 3.0 ships with Vista. You don't have to tell users to download the runtime. Personally, that one makes me happy.)

But what exactly is .NET 3.0? Previously known by the code name WinFX, .NET 3.0 is a set of additional class libraries built on top of .NET 2.0. These libraries provide you with new features as well as new ways and methodologies of programming. These new libraries are:

• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly known as Avalon), which is both a GUI system as well as a somewhat radical, new approach to developing GUIs. (If you're familiar with ASP.NET, there are some definite similarities between ASP.NET and WPF.)
• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF, only two letters in this one), which is a method of programming through the use of workflows, which are individual components that can be connected to work together.
• Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, formerly called Indigo), which is a new system for dealing with web communication, including web services.
• Windows CardSpace (formerly called InfoCard), which is a framework for storing digital identities and selecting the appropriate identity when needed. (Technically, this is part of WCF, but Microsoft often treats it as the fourth library in the .NET framework.)

Additionally, you may have heard of another library called Windows File System, or WinFS. Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided not to include WinFS with Vista.

Find out why Microsoft pulled WinFS

What's particularly interesting about .NET 3.0 is that even though people associate it with Vista, it also runs on Windows XP as do the .NET 3.0 development tools. That means you can start now developing for Vista on Windows XP before you even get a copy of Vista.

In the sections that follow, I cover these libraries in more detail, and then cover some tools available. Finally I'll show you some other areas of Vista programming.