Eclipse woos Windows Vista developers

Source: Channel Register

Summary:
The Eclipse Foundation is making a play for Microsoft's ISV partners deciding whether to port their applications to Windows Vista with a cross-platform alternative that expands their market reach.

The open source tools consortium has announced four new application frameworks under the umbrella Rich Client Platform (RCP) project. These are intended to help ISVs build client applications and interfaces using Java and XML.

Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse executive director, yesterday urged the legions of Microsoft ISVs to "look at RCP", warning that applications moved to Vista would not be backwards-compatible with older versions of Windows.

"Microsoft will be very busy trying to convince [ISVs] that now is the time to step away from Win32 to WinFX," he said. "In RCP, you find the framework lets you build Vista applications but ship product on Mac and Linux. If you are going to move off Win32 you should also look at RCP."

He added: "If you move your application to WinFX you are in a position to not be backwards compatible with Win32. "He was speaking at the annual EclipseCon show in Santa Clara, California.