Here is another point that I will be making in my Whidbey BCL talk.

Most people have seen this Base Class Library diagram many times. Here’s a picture you have seen a thousand times before where the namespaces are organized hierarchically. There seems to be an attempt to stack them as though they were building blocks, with the fundamentals on the bottom and the UI stuff at the top.

If you look at the WinFX namespace diagram (to which Whidbey is an evolutionary step) you can see that the classes are now grouped not by namespace, but by functionality. I don’t recall seeing the classes organized like this before I went to the PDC, though I could be wrong.

Thanks to the Chilean MVP website, I was able to find some jpgs of this poster that I have on my wall. Here is a small one , click on it to get a HUGE one that you can actually read (warning the big one is almost 1MB)

What you will see is, for example, pieces of System.Web in the “presentation” bucket, in the  “Data” bucket in the “Communication” bucket and even in the “Fundamentals” bucket.

Though of course, it will always be important to understand the hierarchy of the classes, this shift in perception will make a developer’s evolution to Avalon easier.

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