A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Avalon Beta 1 RC

Whether you’re new to Avalon with this Beta 1 RC release, or whether you’ve been working on an application since the very first PDC release of Avalon, you’ll hopefully find the following article a useful guide to the major feature areas and changes of this Beta 1 RC release. I wrote this article to appear on MSDN, and it’s currently just going through the pipeline to be propped up to the web. Since I know some people have been champing at the bit to explore this new release sooner rather than later, I’ve posted it online here as an interim measure.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2005
  "The platform also provides metadata readers and writers (so that, for instance, you could edit the EXIF metadata contained within a JPEG file and resave the updated version)."
  
  Will these metadata writers result in the image data being recompressed when the metadata is changed? And therefore for lossy compression codecs like jpeg result in image loss even when the image bits aren't modified.
  
  This is the case today with the GDI+ support for modifying EXIF data etc.
• Anonymous
  May 27, 2005
  In response to the question about Avalon's support for editing metadata, I got this reply back from the imaging PM: "Our JPG codec does support editing metadata without decoding/re-encoding the image, but 3rd party codec writers will have to implement this themselves in their own codecs if they have a lossy format."
  
  Hope this helps!
  
  Tim
• Anonymous
  May 28, 2005
  I take my first steps with the May Avalon/Indigo Beta 1 RC