Welcome to Acropolis

A New Phase for the Acropolis Project

The Acropolis incubation project has been a great learning experience for us and we have received a lot of great feedback that will keep us very busy for quite a while.

We are very excited to be entering the next phase of the project where we will begin to roll many of the Acropolis concepts into future versions of the .NET Framework for the desktop and Silverlight. Unfortunately, while we figure out exactly how to go about this, we have decided not to release any more Acropolis CTP's. We’re going to keep the current CTP bits available to allow you to continue prototyping and evaluating the Acropolis concepts. There will be no new functionality added to the Acropolis CTPs but we do hope that you will continue to provide feedback to us on what you like or don’t like.

We do have some good news though! We were pleasantly surprised to get feedback from many of you that you want 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.

We are very excited to announce that we are going to be working closely with the Microsoft Patterns & Practices team to provide guidance (samples, applications blocks, patterns and so on) for building composite client applications for .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. As part of that effort we want to engage with those that have been following the Acropolis project to ensure that this guidance meets your needs. Glenn Block, the Patterns & Practices client product manager, has much more information about the Composite Applications for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 project here. (Click for his post.)

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.

Thanks again for your feedback and expect to hear more in the next couple of months about our future plans.

The Acropolis Team

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