Microsoft announced today that they are renaming the WinFX to “.NET Framework 3.0”. WinFX was the (confusing in my opinion…) umbrella name for things like WPF (aka Avalon) and WCF (aka Indigo).
They are basically killing the WinFX name all together and will brand everything as .NET Framework 3.0 which will ship with Vista. Framework 3.0 will be available on the following platforms:
- Vista
- XP SP2
- Windows Server 2003
They are officially dropping support for Windows 98 and NT 4.0 with this version of the Framework.
One important note; the core .NET Framework functionality is NOT changing meaningfully with 3.0. There are a bunch of new services being layered on top of the current core functionality in the Framework. There was likely alot of discussion about calling this .NET Framework 2.5 rather than 3.0 to indicate that it is not a major upgrade, but they likely decided to go with 3.0 because of the scope of the new services.
There are some details here.
I think this is a great move - the WinFX name was always confusing and never established any traction with decision makers or developers. This falls into the 'sometimes less is more' school of thought. The .NET name has so much momentum that even if Microsoft wanted everyone to use the WinFX name, everyone was going to end up calling it '.NET '. People talk about building '.NET apps. - they weren't going to start talking about building 'WinFX apps'.
Biggest concern I have is the rate/frequency of churn Microsoft is introducing to the .NET Framework. We are going to go from 2.0 to 3.0 to something else (Visual Studio 2007 will likely require some level of update to the Framework) in 18 months. That's faster churn that corporate customers are going to adopt and distribution of the Framework is still a big hurdle to using .NET to build apps that will be broadly distributed.
In the end, the changes are positive (both the naming changes and the changes to the technology Microsoft is making).