re: Gotta Love Misinformed Authors Spreading FUD

I have no problem with the opinion that Steve Gillmor shares both in his original eWeek article or in his subsequent comments in Drew's blog on the topic.  Specifically, I appreciate his willingness to stand behind his views.  To quote Mr. Gillmor,

“As for Robert Scoble, he is certainly capable of standing behind his own views when he wants to. I certainly stand behind mine.”

I take issue, however, with exactly what he is standing behind.  Is it the view that XAML stands for the Transaction Authority Markup Language?  Is it the opinion that Longhorn “veers-away” from some unstated (and, to the best of my knowledge, non-existant) standard that separates the layout and logic portions of an application?  Could it be that he stands behind the idea that developers create applications using the XSD 'language'?  Or that programmers will have to 'unlearn' XSD once Longhorn arrives. If so, it might be better to find a more stable platform on which to make your stand.

The idea that I'm going to have to wait until 2006 before getting access to some of the functionality that will be available in Longhorn is frustrating to me as a developer.  Sometimes ignorance can be bliss.  But I balance my frustration with the ability to better plan my current application architectures.  Do I expect to include XSD/XML functionality in my current code?  Certainly, assuming that I want my applications to be able to exchange data with not only other Microsoft products but the rest of the computing world.  Do I expect that arrival of Longhorn to change my use of XSD/XML?  Only in the integration that my apps have with the file system on which they are running.  The rest of the world speaks XML and I don't think that Longhorn will change that significantly.  Nor is the release of Longhorn likely to make my life as a developer more difficult, as Mr. Gillmor suggests.  If I take advantage of the information that is being made available by Redmond now, I should be ready for it, whenever it gets here.