Everyone's favourite OS vendor, Microsoft has teamed up with and Dassault Systemes (developers of Catia and owners of SolidWorks) have revealed plans to "collaborate to support" Microsoft's Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) format in Dassault's XML (3D Extensible Markup Language) format.
If you don't know, Dassault (themselves working with Lattice3D) developed the 3DXML format as the basis for its data exchange and communcation strategy. It's a high accuracy geometry format that also allows the user to store all manner of product structure (BOM etc.) information. For the techies, its based on Gregory Patches, which mean you can store high-order surfaces in datafiles that are mere Kb, rather than Mb bloat that we CAD users are used to. This technology is also going to be built into SolidWorks and eDrawings at some point in the future.
Essentially, what this announcement means is that when Longhorn (the next rev of Windows) is releases, 3DXML will be fully compatible. Microsoft's XAML language is the format for "Avalon," the code name of the next presentation subsystem for the Windows US - which is going to be fully vector based and will take advantage of graphics processors to handle UI matters more efficiently.
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