Microsoft offers development tools for Mac, Web
At the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week, Microsoft said it will allow programmers to use its latest front-end development tools to write applications that run on operating systems other than Windows Vista, the forthcoming edition of desktop Windows.
The company introduced Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, or WPF/E, software to build applications using Microsoft's XAML page layout language in conjunction with JavaScript.
Until this week, it was thought that Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly code-named Avalon, could be used only to build graphics-rich applications on Windows. But because JavaScript runs on many operating systems, developers could, in theory, use WPF/E tooling to target several operating systems.
Apple's Mac OS will be one of the operating systems supported with WPF/E, as well as older versions of Windows and Microsoft Smartphone, according to Microsoft executives. And other operating systems are planned, said Forrest Key, group product manager in Microsoft's developer tools division, without confirming plans for Linux support.
