If you haven’t seen it already, you should read the message from David Treadwell. David’s in charge of all of the WinFX at Microsoft and he’s got the details of how and why Microsoft is bringing WinFX to Windows XP and Windows 2003. This news is nothing but good for external developers making their livings targeting Microsoft technologies. For example, the #1 feature request we got from early Avalon users was to ship it on previous versions of Windows and with this announcement, that’s exactly what we’re planning to do, along with much of the rest of WinFX.

What does that mean for developers that are exploring WinFX today? First and foremost, you should continue to focus on the .NET Framework for all of your applications and Windows Forms for your smart client applications for the foreseeable future. It’s going to be quite a while yet before you should do more then explore WinFX, and targeting you applications at the .NET Framework ensures that you apps will continue to run with WinFX and beyond. When targeting WinFX specifically in the future, the interoperability between Windows Forms and Avalon will be strong, so the investment you make today in .NET will be preserved as we evolve the platform into the future.