I have a huge respect for Miguel de Icaza. He’s the guy that almost single-handedly reimplemented huge chunks of the .NET compiler, the runtime and the pieces of the class libraries – see the Mono project.

But his remark from a few days ago, while catchy, is way off the mark. He said, and I quote:

    Microsoft's Avalon is the J2EE of GUI APIs.

I don’t believe Miguel has spent enough time with Avalon to make witty remarks like this. If he did, there’s no way he would think this way.

Contrast his remark with what Eric Sink had to say on the matter, in several blog posts while actually building something. (I won’t link to all posts, but just search for “WPF” and you’ll find them all)

As soon as I start actively working on the GUI of my app, I will have more to say. I know that I will be using Avalon and find it far superior to anything else (on Windows!) including WinForms.