And another of the many innovations I have (and have yet to) stumble across is the new declarative (more on that later) language from Microsoft. This is what appears to be a direct aim at combating Adobe’s hopes with AIR, and Flex both in one. The similarities become even more obvious when you see more in depth details on the way the script is coded.

For those who don’t know, Adobe AIR stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime, which is a way for existing designers or developers devigners (thanks Lee) that work in Adobe’s prime field, the internet, to create quick RIAs (AIR backwards, or is it a coincidence) without learning new scripts. The term RIA is as defined by Adobe - Microsoft seems to use this acronym in a fairly different way to Adobe, which I’ll cover more in forthcoming articles.

Flex is (presumably) a branch of the Flash project, fairly old, relying on the mXML code - a implementation of XML (coming back to this too). It publishes Adobe Flash content and it targeted for developers used to XML and AS classes to compile. It can also compile AIR (Flash-based) applications as Flash itself does. The other way (somewhat irrelevant to the article and less-used anyway) is via HTML, but has less favour due to the main reason people compile AIR is little code experience, and easier design.

So, back to MSD. Microsoft’s D is not the actual name, it is a code name given to the project by their team. The code is of a declarative type, which means that instead of instructions on how to compile, it provides a way of declaring what something is like (starting to ring bells, Flex users?).

The similarities get even more painful to watch when you bear in mind how similar MXML and D’s language XAML really is. Microsoft will not reveal the nature of the code but we can easily assume that two types of code, aimed less than normal at developers built on the same framework, that both produce some form of declarative application has a high risk of, perhaps, taking a chunk out of each other’s market share.

Microsoft has inadvertently made it very obvious how they had not seen Adobe AIR coming, and were concerned at it’s release, some would even argue that it’s rapid employment of platform evangelists points at the change in attitude. Not that Adobe haven’t (Lee Brimelow, Serge Jespers) and not that it’s a bad thing - I’m more than glad that Lee will be having more time to devote to his audience.

It’s got a lot to prove, as we have already seen Microsoft linking it’s projects to too many others, squeezing as much as possible out of the revenue from it. Hopefully this will be a simpler project with simple working, because that’s really what a code not targeting developers should do. That’s all we ask!

As a side-note, google around with Windows 7 and you’ll understand what I mean by ‘overhaul’. I’ll write a bit about the changes soon. Just keep an open mind of a non-Bill Gates Microsoft. Big changes are happening (in a roll-neck).