Acropolis is Dead! Long live Acropolis!

The Acropolis team announced today that Acropolis will not advance from CTP to a supported release.  (For more on Acropolis, see this post.)  But, they also announced that they want to help customers who'd like to take Acropolis into production be successful until an alternative is available. 

IMPORTANT UPDATE: I heard from the Acropolis team that I misinterpreted their post or maybe overstated intentions when I said they wanted to help customers who'd like to take Acropolis into production be successful until an alternative is available. This was my interpretation of the following text from the Acropolis team blog linked above:

“We do have some good news though! We were pleasantly surprised to get feedback from many of you that you would like to go live with Acropolis based solutions in the short term. To us that validated a lot of the thinking we have been doing and it is a positive indicator of the Acropolis approach. Because of this type of feedback, we want to help you continue to take advantage of the Acropolis concepts and the power of the .NET platform while we figure out the longer term plan.” (emphasis added)

The Acropolis team has kindly let me know:

"The Acropolis team has no plans to support any “Go Live” for Acropolis. Here is our guidance regarding any live production project:

“If you have evaluated Acropolis and are unsure whether to adopt it for your project, or to use the existing CAB, or to wait for the new guidance, our guidance for this situation remains the same - if you are building a Windows Forms LOB composite client (with maybe rich islands of WPF content) you should carefully evaluate the current CAB release. If you are specifically interesting in building composite applications on .NET 3.5, please get involved with the Patterns & Practices project and help us to deliver a guidance package that meets your requirements.” (emphasis added)

My apologies for any confusion. And sincere thanks to the Acropolis team for helping me clearly set the correct expectations about there being no support for Acropolis in production!  

I do still wonder about the actual intent of the text above that led me astray (i.e., "help" doesn't mean support -- but what does it mean?) Maybe I'm just dense today. In any case, I've asked the Acropolis team for help with this, too, and if it starts making any more sense to me I'll update this post again. 

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post. -John

UPDATE 2: Ok, the Acropolis team got back to me with this:

"...the intention is that the P&P guidance project is the help that was alluded to in the paragraph you quoted. Probably should have started the following paragraph with “So we are very excited…” or something…

"Tricky business this blogging stuff isn’t it? "

Yep -- now, that is clearer than ever! - John

And perhaps the most important part of the announcement is that an alternative is, indeed, in the works.  This will be delivered by the Patterns and Practices team.  Glenn Block has a rundown on the thinking here.  It seems that many of the composite app learnings around modularity, services, event brokering, etc., will be preserved.  And yet, the go-forward approach is apparently new enough to warrant a new name. 

[Aside: Apparently following in the naming tradition "WPF/E" (for everywhere) -- the new, improved approach for building WPF composite client applications is called... "WPF Composite Client". Let's hope that the example set by WPF/E -- transmogrifying into "Silverlight" also continues, and we eventually get a cool name at release.    ]

Perhaps best of all, the Acropolis team announced that the core Acropolis concepts will be rolled into future .NET framework releases.  In the meantime, the P&P team will shepherd composite application client guidance from here to there, with guidance delivered (in increments as they go) by the end of CY2008. 

If you or friends have any Acropolis work that you'd like to "go live" with in the very near future -- please let me know so we can try to get you connected to the right folks on the P&P/Acropolis teams to help you be successful until an alternative is available. 

Technorati tags: Acropolis, WPF, Patterns and Practices, Smart clients, Composite Applications

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