If you have been watching the blogosphere lately you would have heard about the Apache Software Foundation pulling the plug on an umbrella project called Avalon. This may have caused some confusion amongst the .NET developer community where Avalon is the code name for a new graphics and UI construction stack.

Avalon (Java) is (was) a set of frameworks supporting IoC. I’m not going to talk about them directly here, but I do want to reflect on one of the advantages of not having a 5,000 pound gorilla IDE which dominates the developer landscape – that is it frees people up to explore these code intensive frameworks because the expectation of productivity increases via some kind of designer support is pretty low.

I’d love to try some of these things in future projects (ports to .NET that is) but have trouble swallowing the pill. Of course I wouldn’t even consider it if the ServiceLocater pattern that is implemented across the framework wasn’t also broken (try doing IoC in a Windows Forms app at runtime and tell me how far you get before you start resorting to hacks).

Hopefully this will be something that is fixed in Avalon (from Microsoft) . . .