John Montgomery lays out a high level roadmap for Avalon in a recent blog post. I'm glad to see a bit of official clarification around this. This information has been available for a while in a variety of forums, but there was still confusion so it is nice to have it all in one spot and official.

There are a couple of things in this post that are of additional interest, IMHO.

1. Avalon is a mid-2006 release. It will be interesting to see how this maps to Longhorn's release cycle. The initial impression (and that is all it was really) was that the Avalon work would be delivered prior to Longhorn. With Longhorn also slated for 2006, it looks like Longhorn is going to be a late 2006 release. Can anyone say Windows 2007???
2. VS.Next is clearly post-Avalon based on John's post. This is no big surprise since it has always been loosely associated with being a Longhorn timed release. Given the timing from #1, it seems clear that there will be a nice time gap between Avalon and VS.Next. And since tools releases have traditionally occurred well after the associated OS release, it could be some time before we see VS.Next. Bummer, but not unexpected. If VS.Next and Longhorn end up being tied together from a release date perspective, I think you are all but assured a 2007 release time frame. I will be interested to see what kind of tool support will be available for Avalon in the interim. We will not see rapid adoption if its just Visual Notepad.
3. John covers this in his comments section, but the end user adoption of the Avalon update will be interesting. John says he does not think it will be a big deal since 100+ million downloads of the .NET Framework have happened. However, there is still a perception that getting the Framework out is difficult and it is not ubiquitous. This was a roadblock to using WinForms over the Internet for a supplier application at a customer of mine recently. I would be very interested to see the mix of Framework installs on Win 9x, NT, 2000, and XP and then some extrapolation on the Avalon's potential installed base on a much smaller XP footprint. I imagine there is still a lot of Win2000 and older stuff out there that cool new Avalon web apps would not be able to talk to. Perhaps not...

Disclaimer: Once again, this is all my personal musings. I am, once again, a mushroom and totally in the dark. Ok, maybe not completely but this is all conjecture on my part. None of this should be construed as an "Official Microsoft Statement".

Official Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.