The skinny on the hype around InfoPath
Took the red pill, nothing happened..
Granted, I didn't take it in the presence of Morpheus, so I didn't have any kool-aid to wash it down. :)
It seems like everyone has done "Hello World" with InfoPath, and pronounced it cool. I'll grant you, that it does make a cool "Hello World", but where does it go beyond that?
For the uninitiated, InfoPath lets you rapidly build a UI front end for an XML document, web service, or database. You can update the data source through this UI. It is able to infer an impressive amount of information from the data source, and build a fairly "right the first time" UI that handles optional sections, repeating sections, etc. It also gives you a drop-down for enumerations, date picker for dates, etc. All good stuff.
But what if you really want to build an application with this? There's no .NET here. You're putting buttons on a form, and writing your code in JScript. When you take an InfoPath application (?) and publish it, it emits a .xsn file. To use this .xsn, I would guess that the user must also have InfoPath installed. Inside of the .xsn (which Don pointed out is just a zip or cab or something that WinRar has no trouble extracting once you rename it) you have your UI saved as an .xsd (interesting), stylesheets that control the look and feel of your query forms and the resulting data, and some minimal JScript goo to control the flow. (I wonder what the XForms people think of all this?)
So where is this really useful? I guess it lets an info-worker build UIs for a lot of different back-ends. Is this useful on the Internet? No. It looks like these .xsn files will be "no-touch" deployable from a web server or sharepoint, but again, you're looking at IE and InfoPath on the client, so this is Intranet only. Even though this is all saved as XMLish stuff, I don't think it's going to be portable outside the MS universe any time soon.
Here's what I really want. I want this UI builder in VS. I want to be able to drill into a web reference, pick a method, drag it onto my win/web form, and have it infer an intelligent UI, and optionally the code to actually connect it to the data source. I want to be able to do the same thing with databases and xml documents. I want to build real desktop or web solutions. If I want to deploy UIs that run client side, but are served from a web server or sharepoint, isn't that winforms, and no-touch? If I want to make something ubiquitous on the client, do I want it to be the Framework, or InfoPath?
I only took the red pill a couple hours ago, and maybe it's a time-release sort of thing. Or maybe I'm just not seeing the light.
Please enlighten...
[Sean 'Early' Campbell & Scott 'Adopter' Swigart's Radio Weblog]
8:24:30 PM 
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