Is Sparkle a Flash killer? Will Web designers be more involved with development teams in building Web applications? Microsoft created a new tool named Sparkle to design and build vector-based, 3D Windows applications that look very much like Flash applications.

Microsoft's new GUI paradigm, as part of the next-genreration Windows operating system named Vista, uses vector-based interfaces built with a new tool named Sparkle, which produces the underlying code in an XML language called XAML. It's very exciting stuff for designers and developers. Microsoft has definitely produced a new way of building applications that everyone will be excited about.

Sparkle is engineered so that designers can build real Windows application interfaces that developers can add funcitonality to — this could be monumental: usually, designers create designs in a graphics app like Photoshop, which is just an image that developers use as a guide to build the real application interface; but with Sparkle, the designer builds the actual interface in Sparkle, which generates the code for the interface as XMAL, Microsoft's new XML-based GUI language.

What this new approach could mean is that the design can create the interface exactly as it should appear, rather than handing it off to a developer who will have to sacrefice parts of the design to make the interface work.

Watch the video on the Channel9 Forum at Introducing Sparkle.