By default, Xamarin.Forms handles orientation changes for you automatically, e.g.

My goal was to take the name and address of a place and show it on the native map app regardless of what mobile platform on which my app was running. While Xamarin.Forms provides a cross-platform API to launch the URL that starts the map app, the URL format is different depending on whether you’re using the Windows Phone 8 URI scheme for Bing maps, the Android Data URI scheme for the map intent or the Apple URL scheme for maps.

This is what I came up with:

Settings allow you to separate the parameters that configure the behavior of your app separate from the code, which allows you to change that behavior without rebuilding the app. This is handle at the app level for things like server addresses and API keys and at the user level for things like restoring the last user input and theme preferences. Xamarin.Forms provides direct support for neither, but that doesn’t mean you can’t easily add it yourself.

App Settings

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve long been fascinated with using the C# syntax as a command line execution environment. It could be that PowerShell doesn’t do it for me (I’ve seriously tried half a dozen times or more). It could be that while LINQPad comes really close, I still don’t have enough control over the parsing to really make it work for my day-to-day command line activities. Or it may be that my friend Tim Ewald has always challenged csells to sell C shells by the sea shore.

Often when I’m building my MVC 2 application using Visual Studio 2010, I get the following error:

It all started innocently enough. I was implementing a “Older Posts/Newer Posts” feature for my new web site and was writing code like this:

IEnumerable<Post> FilterByCategory(IEnumerable<Post> posts, string category) {
  if( !string.IsNullOrEmpty(category) ) {
    return posts.Where(p => p.Category.Contains(category));
  }
}
...
  var posts = FilterByCategory(db.Posts, category);
  int count = posts.Count();
...

I was building a little WPF app to explore a hierarchical space (OData, if you must know), so of course, I was using the TreeView. And since I’m a big fan of data binding, of course I’ve got a hierarchical data source (basically):

On 1/16/08, Microsoft announced the ability to download some of the .NET Framework source code for debugging. This download process was only supported inside of a properly configured Visual Studio 2008.

21 Days Later: Kerem Kusmezer and John Robbins released a tool to download the source code en mass. Frankly, I’m surprised it took so long. : )

Interested? Drop Doug a line.

For structural typing fans (and they’ll be more of you over time — trust me), David Meyer has posted a duck typing library for .NET. There are many reasons this is cool, but in summary, it allows for many of the dynamic features of languages like Python and Ruby to used used in any .NET

Lutz has ported some of his .NET code to use the Silverlight 1.1 alpha, which includes the mini-CLR (or whatever we’re calling it these days : ). Enjoy.

If you haven’t already heard about Microsoft’s new high fidelity, cross-platform application development platform, you just haven’t been paying attention. Silverlight is the new name for WPF/E (although it’s still XAML-based) and does some *amazing* things.

And, if you can wait just a little while longer, you can read about Silverlight in Programming WPF (available now in Rough Cut format and for pre-order from Amazon) in an appendix by my friend and yours, Shawn Wildermuth. Shawn’s been doing a ton of Silverlight work lately, including doing a bunch of Silverlight presentations for Microsoft, so he knows of what he speaks.

Savas turned me onto an amazing WPF/E application. I don’t speak the language of the web site, but the screenshot on Savas’s site is worth a look…

P.S. I don’t smoke (except for the occasional cigar) and I definitely don’t want to smell smoke while I eat or in my clothes, but the fact that smokers are no longer allowed to smoke most places strikes me as a violation of an important liberty. Have those studies about the effects of 3rd party smoke been verified?

“The British Library is one of the world’s leading libraries and the national library of the United Kingdom. By charter, it holds a copy of every book ever published in the UK, along with 58 million newspapers, 4.5 million maps, and 3.5 million sound recordings. They hold some of the most priceless literary treasures in existence, including the Codex Sinaiticus (one of the oldest New Testaments in existence), the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks, the first atlas of Europe by Mercator, the original illustrated manuscript Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jane Austen’s History of England and Mozart’s musical diary. …

“Enter a fantastic new application, developed in partnership between the British Library and Armadillo Systems. The British Library have digitized the pages of fifteen of their most valuable works and created Turning the Pages, a browser-based WPF application that allows you to interact with these books in a virtual environment from the comfort of your home.”

Wow. This is literally the only way to interact with some of this material and it’s enabled with WPF. Nice.

Don has a piece up about something that I’ve always called “API Usability.” The idea when building libraries is to write client code first against some pretend API that you wish existed and then to implement that API. Another good name for this approach would be “RAD API Design,” simply because it’s the same way I prefer to design UI — layout the UI the way you’d like it to look and then implement it that way. Of course, I have to admit to preferring Don’s name for this style of programming (I like what he calls my conferences, too : ).

BTW, the comments to Don’s piece mention to startling similarity between this approach and Test-Driven Development (TDD). I’m a huge fan of TDD (NUnit is a wonderful tool I use all day every day). I’d say that TDD is a generalization of my little “API usability” technique in that you can use it for all kinds of things, e.g. code coverage, perf testing, stress testing, etc, including API usability.

If you’re a designer looking for XAML design tools, and you’re a designer type (you know — beret, turtle neck, a wardrobe that extends beyond jeans and t-shirts), you’ve got two choices from Microsoft. You can use Expression Design [1] for static XAML graphics or Expression Blend (aka Sparkle) for dynamic XAML interfaces. Both are available in pre-release form (CTP for Design and Beta 1 for Blend), so give them a try.

[1] “Expression Design” is not to be confused with “Expression Designer”, which is the old name for Sparkle (Blend).

I expected eventually to get a WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere) download or two, but these guys went crazy; they just released an entire WPF/E DevCenter this morning. Here’re just a few highlights:

• WPF/E CTP for Windows and the Mac
• WPF/E online reference, samples and downloadable SDK
• Microsoft Expression Design CTP
• SWF to XAML Converter
• Adobe Illustrator to WPF/XAML Export Plug-In

After a monumental amount of work, the .NET Framework 3.0 has been completed! It ships out of the box in Vista, but for down level clients (Windows XP and Windows Server 2003) and developer tools, see the links below:

• Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework Release Notes
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package (for XP and 2003)
• Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows Vista and .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components in ISO Install and Web Install formats (with it’s own set of Release Notes)
• Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0, both for WF and for WCF/WPF (WCF/WPF extensions are the November 2006 CTP — there are more to come)
• WCF/WPF/WF Cross-Technology Integration Samples (I admit I’m biased here to point out the parts of .NET 3.0 that I worked on : )

My friend Jeff asked me to do a terrible thing yesterday: “How do I show a form in the popup window that a menu shows?” I said, “Dude! Don’t do that — write a dialog!” And that’s what he did, but then, like a train wreck, I couldn’t look away. It took me all of 10 minutes of very straight forward coding and here we are:

The CTPs are coming so fast and so furious now that I nearly missed the September 2006 .NET Framework 3.0 CTP:

• Release Notes
• .NET Framework
• SDK
• VS05 Integration for WCF and WPF
• VS05 Integration for WF
• Cider Release Notes

This one should be about done:

• .NET 3.0 RC1 Release Notes
• .NET 3.0 RC1 Framework Components
• .NET 3.0 RC1 SDK
• .NET 3.0 RC1 VS05 Tools (including Cider)
• .NET 3.0 RC1 SDK online

MikeDub has a nice summary to get you started down the road to WPF ClickOnce deployment, both for stand-alone apps and browser-based apps (XBAPs). Enjoy.

As you may or may not recall, Doug Purdy and I had some trouble at the last PDC getting Avalon (WPF) and Indigo (WCF) to work together. To save myself from having that trouble again, I came back from the PDC and starting the “WinFX Cross-Pillar SDK Samples Working Group,” which is just a fancy name for the PMs in charge of Avalon, Indigo and Workflow samples getting together to make sure that we have a list of simple technology samples showing the three W*F technologies working together.

You can see the results of that work in the .NET 3.0 SDK under the Integration Samples for WinFX Features topic. Right now, there are 9 integration samples and I’m hoping to almost double that by .NET 3.0 RTM. I’d love feedback. Thanks!

The WinFX name is no more. Instead, WinFX (.NET 2.0 + W*F)is .NET 3.0.

Beta 2 signals the beginning of the final drive towards RTM for WinFX:

• Readme
• Runtime Components
• SDK
• VS05 Extensions for Avalon and Indigo
• VS05 Extensions for Workflow

The February ’06 WinFX CTP cometh:

• WinFX RC February CTP Readme
• WinFX Runtime Components
• Windows SDK
• Visual Studio Community Technology Preview - Development Tools for WinFX® (aka Fidalgo)
• VS Extensions for WorkFlow
• Ed’s Big List of WCF Breaking Changes
• Karsten’s Big List of WPF Breaking Changes

Suddenly, I think Larry O’Brien is smart:

“The book, in this case, is Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths’ ‘Programming Windows Presentation Foundation.’ Sells and Griffiths are two top-notch authors, who separately wrote two of the better books on Windows Forms. This book, published by O’Reilly and adorned with a Kudu engraving, probably does about as good a job as possible in introducing a new display framework that is intended to replace, well, everything from User to GDI to GDI+. And, it seems clear, to replace Flash as well.”

It goes without saying that MSDN Magazine doesn’t let the authors pick the titles (who can forget Don’s The Active Template Library Makes Building Compact COM Objects a Joy? : ), but what Ian and I had in mind here was 10 things that would surprise you when learning WPF and getting them in your face right up front. Enjoy.

Here. I’ve uploaded the samples for “Programming Windows Presentation Foundation”

You’ve probably seen this by now, but I thought I’d post the WinFX Nov05 CTP-related links together in a spot where I could find them later. In addition to being closer to what we plan on shipping, this CTP also works with VS05 RTM:

• WinFX Readme
• What’s New in WPF
• WinFX Runtime Components (WCF, WPF and WF)
• WinFX SDK
• VS05 Extensions for WCF and WPF
• VS05 Extensions for WF

If I’ve got an Avalon Button, e.g.

Casey Chesnum has put together what is probably the first real WinFX app: a Media Center “

Here. The one where I find more WF activity instances than I expect

Here.

The one where I finally figure out how to get wca integrated with my WF VS projects in a sane way.

Is there something intrinsic about “

The PDC was a buzz with folks praising WWF

John Gossman, architect on the Sparkle team, has just made a post about how Sparkle uses data binding to hook up the view of the data to the data itself.

Interestingly, his post isn’t about whether they used data binding — that’s a foregone conclusion. Data binding is so powerful that pretty much every non-trivial Avalon app will use it, and Sparkle (a large app with a very rich UI) uses the hell out of it.

To further drive home the point that I am not a graphic artist, Adam Nathan has posted his Avalon port of network Hearts. Wow.

Mike Swanson has posted an amazing Adobe Illustrator to XAML conversion tool. You have to check out the eye candy page

You’ve seen it in the concept videos, now see it for real: Ian has implemented a working magnifying glass in Avalon.

Today Microsoft has published the release candidate of Avalon and Indigo Beta 1. The most interesting features of this release over the CTP releases of the past is that these bits work on Visual Studio 2005 beta 2, both full and express. Enjoy!

Sean Gerety has updated his Avalon sparklines implementation, producing good news, bad news and more good news:

• good news: the sparklines implementation fits nicely in with the other Avalon elements
• bad news: MSFT stock is dead, dead, dead
• good news: sparklines shows how dead MSFT is very nicely!

Sweet!

Wow. This looks really cool.

Gene Webb, Microsoft developer evangelist, has posted the recorded LiveMeeting Indigo SDR (Software Design Review) dry-run videos and slides. And as if that weren’t enough, you can see Steve Swartz, Indigo Architect, give an intro to Indigo on MSDN TV.

I remember a day when SDRs were deep, secret mojo that even folks that knew about them were special, let along actually attending them. Now, we’re posting them on the internet. I love my company.

You can hear Omri sing a few bars of “These are a few of my favorite things” to the tune of Indigo.

Here. This application demonstrates the two things I’m finding that Avalon has changed about my thinking

What with the public availability of the Avalon and Indigo CTPs and our stated goal of pre-beta bit releases to gather feedback, you might wonder,

Steve Maine of Brain.Save() has done a really good job on the description of a set of duplex contracts in Indigo

It took a coupla days more than we wanted ’cuz I was fighting with some internal tools, but the March 2005 Avalon/Indigo CTP is available for public download.

Make sure you follow the instructions on the download page and only use it with the February CTP release of Visual Studio 2005, i.e. don’t use it against the Whidbey beta 2 that’ll “coming soon*” to a theater near you.

Chris Anderson has updated XamlPad for the March 2005 CTP of Avalon and renamed it AvPad

Scott Swigart has a nice video demo of putting the Smart Client Offline Application Block to use. Enjoy!

TheServerSide.NET has a nice summary of what’s new in the Updater Application Block 2.0 from the new Enterprise Library on GDN

If you’re not getting enough Chris Anderson in your diet (and who is?!?), check out these two new interviews:

• ServerSide.NET TechTalk: Chris Anderson on Avalon video
• .NET Rocks: Chris Anderson and the Longhorn Evangelism Team

A new XAML web site enters the fray: XAML.net

Did you miss the Microsoft’s Day of Indigo at VSLive? Have no fear — you can trade your personal details for free access to the entire day of videos from the FTP web site, including:

• Keynote: Introducing Indigo, Eric Rudder, Senior VP of Servers and Tools
• Programming Indigo, Don Box and Steve Swartz
• Building Secure Services, Doug Purdy
• Building Reliable, Asynchronous Services, Shy Cohen
• Orchestrating Service-Oriented Apps With Indigo and BizTalk, Michael Woods (Microsoft) and Curt Peterson (Neudesic)
• Indigo Upgrade and Interoperability, Steve Swartz and Anand Rajagopalan
• Building Service-Oriented Applications Today, Rich Turner

As Microsoft gets nearer the gate on the .NET Framework 2.0 and ClickOnce, we want to make double-sure we understand if and how you’re using/would like to use partial trust and code access security (CAS

Clemens Vasters, international man of mystery, has given up his normal weekend activities of partying and espionage to give us three pieces exploring Indigo:

• A Weekend With Indigo. Part 1: Simple Messaging
• A Weekend With Indigo. Part 2: Fun with Messaging and Explicit Addressing
• A Weekend With Indigo. Part 3: Hard-Core Messaging. Duplex Conversations.

Assuming you don’t have the luxury of dipping the machines your .NET 1.x applications run on in Lucite, you are going to have to make sure that your apps run under .NET 2.0. Normally, that means testing your applications under .NET 2.0 and making changes. However, right now, Jay Roxe at Microsoft is beefing up the .NET 2.0 compatibility test suite, so if there are compatibility problems in your apps, there’s a good chance* that MS will actually apply fixes to the .NET 2.0 framework itself instead of requiring you to make changes to your app.

Jay’s especially interested in “corporate-scale” applications, but I’m sure he’ll consider whatever you’ve got. Don’t be shy! Get your apps into consideration for the .NET 2.0 compatibility test suite today!

Valentin Iliescu has updated his 2D and 3D Avalon Chess for the November 2004 CTP

Ron DeSerranno, founder and CEO of Mobiform, a company that’s been busy building Avalon and XAML tools since the October 2003 PDC, is giving a talk on how “Avalon in conjunction with XAML will revolutionize the user experience on the web and in desktop applications. XAML and Avalon provide a powerful framework that can provide 2D and 3D graphics, fixed document format, animation and multimedia in a single markup language.”

The talk is at the TechVibes MASSIVE 2005 (clearly named by marketing folks : ), March 30th in Vancouver, BC. Drink a pint for me, eh? : )

Wei-Meng Lee shows you how to take advantage of the new web browser and control support in Windows Forms 2.0 to build a tabbed browser using Internet Explorer.

Dino Esposito takes you on “

Another hot topic among Windows Forms programmers is extensibility:

• Add run-time functionality to your application by providing a plug-in mechanism
• Add Plugins to Your App 2: Search dynamically for plugins without Config Files
• The SharpDevelop add-in tree architecture
• Writing Plugin-Based Applications in .NET
• The MS-INC Plug-In Library
• The Razor Framework :: Part 1 :: Plugins/Extensibility
• Several nifty pieces on Lutz’s Reflector add-in model
• “Customizing the Microsoft .NET Framework Common Language Runtime,” by Steven Pratscher
• On Plug-ins and Extensible Architectures: Avoiding “plug-in hell” is from the Eclipse world, but I’m guessing it applies…

It seems that there are any number of ways to do multi-threading in Windows Forms. Here are some of the interesting techniques:

• Give Your .NET-based Application a Fast and Responsive UI with Multiple Threads, Ian Griffiths
• A number of Ted Pattison’s Basic Instincts column pieces cover threading
• Safe, Simple Multithreading in Windows Forms 1.x (part 1, part 2 and part 3), Chris Sells
• Safe, Even Simpler Multithreading in Windows Forms 2.0, Mike Weinhardt
• Asynchronous Windows Forms Programming, Juval Lwy (provides a BackgroundWorker component for Windows Forms 1.x)
• Making windows forms thread safe, Rüdiger Klaehn (generates a proxy class to do synchronization)
• The Daemon Inside and When to go async?, Matthew Adams

Cristian Civera, a Microsoft .NET MVP, has posted a preview of a tool to convert Windows Enhanced Metafiles, an existing vector graphics file format, to XAML, Avalon’s new format for describing vector graphics (among other things). Thanks, Cristian!

Joe Marini, has updated his famous XAML-only Avalon samples for the Nov. 2004 CTP

Robert Scoble has some stuff to say about Avalon, Indigo, Longhorn and packaging. Enjoy.

The Las Vegas edition of VSLive (May 8-11, 2005) will include smart client coverage: “SmartClient Live! - Pragmatic and practical advice on smart client development with VB, C#, and .NET Framework.” There’s no real description of what that really means, but it’s got potential. : )

[via 3Leaf]

Don Box has posted an article on the basics of specifying a service contract in Indigo. Enjoy (I plan to : ).

“The Smart Client Team at Microsoft patterns & practices needs your feedback to evaluate the need of guidance for devices based Smart Clients (Mobile solution scenarios based on .NET Compact Framework).”

Mujtaba Syed has some pretty extensive notes from his VSLive Day of Indigo:

• Introducing Indigo: Eric Rudder and Ari Bixhorn
• Programming Indigo: Don Box and Steve Swartz
• WinFX CTP in March ’05
• Indigo upgrade and interop: Steve Swartz and Anand Rajagopalan
• Building Secure Services with Indigo: Doug Purdy
• Building service-oriented applications today: Richard Turner

Paul Ballard provides a nice summary of the Indigo Day at VSLive. I especially like the acronyms that the Indigo boys were using; the ABCs of Indigo and the CIA

″David Chappell provides an architectural overview of ‘Indigo,’ Microsoft’s unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. The paper covers Indigo’s relationship to existing distributed application technologies in the .NET Framework, the basics of creating and consuming Indigo services, and an overview of Indigo’s capabilities, including security, reliable messaging, and transaction support.”

The first article of a new Indigo programming model since PDC03 (and hopefully the one that’ll stick : ).

″Somasegar says a key component of continuing this momentum is creating ‘connected systems’ that work together by using smart clients. ‘Let’s take the best from the Web client world and the best from the rich client world, and—voila!—you have a smart client,’ Somasegar says. Smart clients can allow several applications to share code with one another while using minimal resources, eliminating the need to duplicate coding efforts; essentially, if one application requires a piece of code existing already in another application, it simply can request the code to be sent over. ‘The cheapest piece of code is the piece of code that you don’t have to write in the first place,’ Somasegar says, as smart clients provide interoperability through Web services and leverage existing investments. ‘Enabling developers to reuse existing assets is a key design goal.’ The end result of using a smart client, ultimately, is a rich user experience that requires using minimal resources.”

″If you looked at the PDC 2003 Indigo bits, you will notice that the [Indigo] programming model changed quite a bit. I think that in fact, every single element of the programming model changed since then. And all for the better. The programming model is so intuitive by now that I am (almost) tempted to say ‘Alright, understood, next technology, please.’”

″Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business, showed off Indigo at this morning’s VSLive! keynote. Indigo, Microsoft’s unified programming model for building service-oriented applications, is a key component of Microsoft’s next Windows release (code-named Longhorn). Rudder asserted that Indigo will provide improved interoperability and productivity, as well as a more flexible security model for developers creating service-oriented applications. He also noted that Indigo will make it easier to build secure, reliable, transacted Web services.”

If you’re not familiar with the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute (pronounced “apt-ka” by those in the know…) or worse, if you just apply it ’til stuff works, you need to read this blog post from Shawn Farkas, SDE/T on the .NET CLR team.

[via Keith Brown]

Mike Marshall over at the 19th hole has been digging into Avalon to experiment with scalable graphics, golf, ClickOnce and 3rd party drawing tools. Check out these installments:

• My foray into the Avalon CTP
• The first hurdle: Creating Complex XAML Paths the Quick and Painless Way
• Step 2: Adding custom XAML attributes
• more to come…

Deepak gives a very simple intro to building menus in Avalon, effectively answering the common questions I normally get about this very subject.

Shawn Burke from the Windows Forms team is trying to make the Windows Forms source available for stepping into during a debugging session. Wahoo! He’s pretty sure he can give it to us w/o the comments. That’s a step up from viewing it via Reflector, imo. Leaving in comments requires all kinds of reviewing work that he may not be able to get to. What do you think? Let Shawn know.

Shawn Burke, Dev. Manager on the Windows Forms team, thinks that MS has finally figured out the problem with controls disappearing from the Designer and points to a fix, mentions an SP for VS03 and promises these fixes applied to VS05.

Shawn, on behalf of the Windows Forms developer community, I’d like to just say: Wahoo!

Kevin Moore, a PM on the Avalon team, is in London for one night (Feb. 28) and wants to gather the Avalon enthused together for dinner. Microsoftie’s have expense accounts for this kind of thing, so if you can stand to listen to Avalon talk over shepherd’s pie, you should let him know

Mobiform has updated their Aurora XAML editor for using on the November 2004 CTP

Here. Holy cow; there are already jobs for XAML folk

Joe Marini, the king of code-less Avalon, has done it again, this time adding interactivity to his samples using Avalon property triggers, all w/o a line of code.

Ari Bixhorn, Lead Product Manager on the Indigo team, talks about his hopes and dreams for Indigo.

I didn’t know that I’d been nominated, but apparently I was canonized yesterday as the Patron Saint of Smart Client Applications. I promise to be a firm but fair Deity. : )

“Karsten shows how to build an animated version of Task Manager using the 2-D animation infrastructure provided by Avalon, then moving into the world of 3-D, showing how to create a dynamically animated 3-D mesh.”

Jason Whittington has some thoughts about ClickOnce and user-managed permission evaluation. Basically, he thinks that the user should have to sacrifice a chicken to get a FullTrust component running on their box via ClickOnce (I’m paraphrasing : ). I definitely see his pov. Thoughts?

Rod Paddock sat down to use Avalon in a real way and then kept notes.

Some of those notes said good things about Avalon

Here.

Ford McKinstry, PM on the Microsoft Indigo team, gives us a hint as to when the next preview release of the Indigo bits will be available:

It’s time for the annual .NET Developer’s Journal Reader’s Choice awards. Even better, this year Windows Forms Programming in C#

I just noticed these two posts from Steve Makofsky formatting web content for compact devices:

• Pocket IE
• dasBlog and .Text on Pocket IE

Here.

If you’re not sure what the heck a Smart Client is, Tim Huckaby explains it like no other:

Here.

I just noticed this on the MSDN Webcast list. I’m hoping to attend myself!

Samuel Wan has posted an excellent explanation of the various terms involved in the public pre-release of the Nov. 2004 Avalon CTP

I like exercising my democratic rights. : )

Do you have a series of simple yet compelling ClickOnce applications in you that you can build and deliver to show off the benefits of Windows Forms 2.0 smart clients? Do you have a track record of delivering top-quality code on time and on budget?

If so, send me a proposal, listing a series of ClickOnce applications, your schedule and your price. You don’t have to be a 3Leaf, a PluralSight, a Relevance LLC, a Wintellect or a DevelopMentor (although I’d be happy to hear from those guys, too!). You just have to have a song in your heart, a snap in your step and a story to tell.

By popular demand, the Avalon team has provided the November 2004 Avalon Community Technology Preview for the general public. In addition, the team has provided a batch file to enable the Avalon project item templates for use in the beta of Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition, which is also freely available to the general public.

This combination enables folks without an MSDN Subscription to try out Avalon with Visual Studio 2005 without an MSDN Subscription.

Deepak Kapoor has launched a new WinFX community: deepwinfx.com

S. “

Here.

If you’ve got .NET 2.0 and the Nov. ’04 Avalon CTP, click here to play my scaling, vector-based, WinFX version of Solitaire. Features include lovely scaling of the cards as the window resizes, real-time drag ‘n’ drop of the cards, sol-like card stacking, ClickOnce deployment and the source. The performance isn’t yet what I’d like it to be because I’m loading the card back resource 52 times, but it’ll get there. Enjoy!

Savas Parastatidis has posted his early work using Avalon 3D to visualize stars in the galaxy. I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen the stars line up like that, but the screen shots are cool anyway. : )

And while we’re on the topic of real-world .NET Smart Client applications, you can’t not take a look at the Washington State University course work resulting in Paint.NET, an all-.NET implementation of a painting program that was initially aimed at merely replacing MS Paint Brush, but has long ago far surpassed it with painting features found only in commercial painting applications.

And, like SharpDevelop, if you like what you see and want to know how a feature was implemented, you have only to download the Paint.NET source code.

APress has made Dissecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop, the book that describes the history and design of SharpDevelop, freely available for download and I’m enjoying it immensely.

I’ve only read the 1st 2 chapters, but the authors have already provided me a nice overview of the major features in SharpDevelop and how they came to be over the history of the project. I’m also very much looking forward to the implementation details later in the book, particularly the add-in model, internationalization, implementing the Windows Forms Designer and, of course, code generation.

I liked the new “How Do I…?” section of the references pages in the WinFX SDK before, but when I ran into the “How do I make an element spin in place?” section of the System.Windows.Shapes.Rectangle (I mean, I need to make elements spin in place all the time!), I fell in love. : )

Rob has posted a description and a couple of work-arounds to a problem some folks are having w/ 100% CPU utilization after an Avalon project is compiled in Visual Studio 2005 beta 1 + the Nov. ’04 Avalon CTP + C#.

If his solution doesn’t work for you (it didn’t for me, but I think I have a weird build), under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\CSharp\Options\Editor, try setting the UpdateRegisterDesignViewOnIdle value to 0 instead of 1. I don’t know what this turns off, but it makes the problem go away. If you trust me, I’ve put together a reg file that sets this value for you here.

Not only has Daniel Moth implemented the Windows Forms 2.0 BackgroundWorker component for the .NET Compact Framework, but he’s also ported my pi calculation application to use this new implementation

“Aurora is a graphical designer developed to create and edit Avalon Windows, elements, and controls. Aurora is built on top of Avalon and renders using the Avalon API. Aurora is designed for use with the November 2004 Avalon Technology Preview Community for Windows XP (CTP).”

Cool!

Karsten has some tips on converting a stand-alone Avalon application into an application that can be hosted in IE.

“The Adobe® Illustrator® SVG Edition of XAMLConverter is now available for free evaluation. The process is as simple is running XAMLConverter, dragging an SVG exported from Adobe® Illustrator® onto the application and the file is automatically converted to XAML. In addition, XAMLConverter runs the XAML file so you may view the results.

“This edition can convert SVG created by tools other than Adobe® Illustrator®. But SVG exported from Adobe® Illustrator® is the only fully supported subset of SVG.”

I said that animation in Avalon is simple. Ian said that it’s hard. We’re both right (I was talking about the programming model and Ian is talking about the nuts and bolts of the implementation), but Ian seems more right because of those fabulous example pictures that explain why wagon wheels look like they’re going backward. Now if he could only explain why computer screens in movies always look like they’ve been engineered to invoke seizures, we’d have something!

John Montgomery wants to know:

“[W]hen it comes to Avalon and Windows Forms interop, I’m curious: how many people will use it and what will they use it for? What are the scenarios that we’ll see? I have my own opinions, of course, but I’m curious about what you think. I’d like to be able to have a conversation with both teams about what scenarios we should optimize for.”

Kevin Schuler and Drew Robbins have compiled a list of dozens of the best VSTO blog entries in 2003 across seven categories ranging from architecture to troubleshooting. If you’re into VSTO

The Avalon experiments keep on happening. This time, check out Avalon Chess!

I’ve long held the belief that the big deal about Avalon is that it provided a platform for a whole new class of data visualization and manipulation software, stuff that most of us can’t even dream of right now. But Edward Tufte can dream of it and in one of his dreams, he invented Sparklines, a very nice way to integrate graphics directly into a sentence instead of relegating it to a whole other paragraph.

As evidence of the power of Avalon to enable the next-gen UI, Sean Gerety has provided an Avalon implementation of Sparklines. Excellent work, Sean.

Drew Marsh has a very nice write-up of the need and usage of dependency properties via attached properties in Avalon, endorsed (with some additional commentary

Read Rod Paddock’s Adventures in Avalon as he installs and binds to a DataSet:

• Avalon Adventures Part 0 : The Setup
• Avalon Adventures Part 1 : Data Access
• Avalon Adventures Part 2 : Basic Data Binding
• Avalon Adventures Part 3: Lists With Style
• Avalon Adventures Part 4: An Event to Remember
• Avalon Adventures Part 5: The Conversion
• Avalon Adventures Summary: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Because Ian doesn’t have blog comments and because the Avalon Animation team doesn’t yet have a blog, Elizabeth Nelson (PM) and Matt Calkins (SDE) have asked that I post the following response to Ian’s recent Animating Custom Types in Avalon post:

“I’m happy to report that building custom animations to animate font size is not necessary. (Nevertheless, Ian Griffiths’s sample is a spiffy example of how to build custom animations!) For the time being, TextEffects provides just the font size animation tools he seeks. There’s even a TextEffects sample in the Avalon CTP Announcement that Arik, Karsten and Tim put together. The properties of interest for font size animations are ScaleX and ScaleY.

“This isn’t the end of the story on Font animations — we’re still working on hooking a few things up internally to make it easier to use animations. Regardless of what else we cook up for built-in Font animations, TextEffects will come in handy for animating individual characters in a string in a coordinated manner.

“As for the concern about rendering artifacts when enlarging text, the issue is definitely on our radar!

“Thanks for your enthusiasm for custom animations.”

but it wasn’t until Woodward and Bernstein shared it with the world that he did anything about it. Now that we’ve got an Avalon that works with Windows XP and Visual Studio, if there’s something about it that you don’t like, blog about it or post to the Avalon newsgroup. Cry out loud! Don’t keep it inside. Don’t learn how to hide your feelings…

P.S. I *know* that there are some folks that want the Avalon CTP bits that don’t have MSDN subscriptions. You have my most sincere apologies.

Ian Griffiths illustrates the core concepts in Avalon animation by implementing a custom font size animation class. Basically,

Karsten says:

Rob Relyea, a Lead PM on the Avalon team, has posted the 7 goals that drives the XAML design decisions

John Montgomery, Microsoft Marketing Maven in charge of .NET and WinFX messaging, has posted the road map agreed on by the Windows Forms and Avalon teams about which UI stack to use and when (an excerpt is presented here):

“Microsoft’s roadmap for client UI development has three main phases:

I really wish Ian would port his TopDraw sample to the Avalon CTP

Ian gives into peer pressure (I love the Internet : ) and posts an update to his DirectX mesh (.x) files to XAML conversion tool that works with the Avalon CTP.

Now that we have an Avalon that works with WinXP and VS05, what’s holding you back?

Richard Childress has posted on his experiences with the Smart Client Offline Application Block as valuable for not only solving his domain-specific problem, but also in getting .NET to be used at all:

“Working in IT, where we try to only write code that helps run our business, it’s a Great Thing when you don’t have to write plumbing code. Writing a class here and another class there, while leveraging a big chunk of code that we didn’t write to solve a problem, is golden. This block, itself, is actually helping drive the case for starting to incorporate the framework into our app(s). The value is unquestionable.”

As cool as XamlPad and Bouncing Boing Ball are, I’ve had at least one blog comment from someone looking for a useful Avalon CTP application (something not targeted at developers, I’m guessing). Well look no more, because we have Pong! What more use can we expect from our computers than that?!? : )

So, I’ve never done anything with Python, so I’ve never really figured out what the big deal was. However, if the interactive Python development environment is anything like the experience of XamlPad, I’m glad I haven’t tried it, otherwise I’d never be able to go back.

Oh my god, that interactive model is wonderful! I sat down this afternoon to port my Longhorn Solitaire code to the Avalon CTP and had to completely re-write my GridPanel layout code to use the new Grid because the GridPanel is deprecated. However, I didn’t know a thing about the Grid, so found a great little Grid sample from the WinFX SDK and started the latest version of XamlPad and taught myself how to use the Grid interactively.

It’s amazing to me how much stuff they’ve packed into Visual C# Express. In this Channel9 demo from Dan Fernandez, I learned about a ton of VS05 features that I didn’t know about. I hope they all work from the non-Express product…

It’s a common Avalon question: how does XAML get translated into an Avalon visual tree, i.e. the set of Avalon objects? In this post

As cool as Chris Anderson’s XamlPad sample is, I think Gaston “I’m a VS man” Milano has done him one better with a XAML viewer integrated directly into Visual Studio 2005 beta 1. Wahoo!

Karsten has updated his 3D animation play toy to the Avalon CTP

Chris Anderson has posted two samples of Avalon and Windows Forms integration (a simple one and a more complicated one

Daniel Lehenbauer, an SDE on the Avalon team, has ported his 3D Bouncing Ball Boing demo to the Avalon CTP

Tim Sneath, Avalon evangelist and all around charming fellow (maybe because his name reminds me of a Dr. Suess character?), posted a nice little tour of Avalon via the the WinFX SDK. Enjoy.

Rob Relyea, a Lead PM on the Avalon team, has posted a set of instructions for using the Avalon CTP project templates from Visual C# Express and Visual Basic Express

Robi Khan and Mark Levison from Databeacon will be doing a MSDN DevChat on their recent commercial application using No-Touch Deployment. It’s on Wednesday, November 24, 2004 at 10am PST. I’ll be watching and you can sign up here.

Chris Anderson cloned an internal app for the Avalon CTP called “XamlPad” and posted it on his site. Enjoy.

This just in: Chris has posted a version of his XamlPad Clone on a server via ClickOnce so you can just run it directly (and it works, too! Wahoo!).

Just in case you haven’t noticed, MSDN Subscribers should download the Avalon Community Technology Preview, which enables Avalon to run under Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and to integrate with Visual Studio 2005. Also, you can access the WinFX SDK that reference Avalon online. And as if that weren’t enough, the Avalon evangelist and product teams have teamed up to give you an overview of what’s new in this pre-release of Avalon. Of course, we’re still on the way to beta, let alone an RTM of Avalon, so there’s still plenty of time to give the Avalon team feedback about what you love and don’t love in the Avalon newsgroup.

And as if that we’re enough, here’s some views and news about the Avalon CTP:

Channel9 has a nice video of Scott Garvey, a Microsoft Smart Client Evangelist, talking about what’s a smart client and what’s not. Scott also discussed some examples of smart clients, e.g. eBay for

Jonathan Wells, Matt Lusher and I have re-launched the MSDN Smart Client Developer Center web site, kicking off the new site with four headlines of interest:

• Smart Clients Defined: just so we’re all clear what the heck a smart client is
• Windows Forms Bug Reporting Challenge: the Windows Forms team is giving away branded backpacks and t-shirts to top Windows Forms 2.0 bug reporters
• Business Desktop Deployment Framework: all you’d ever want to know about deploying Windows in an enterprise so that you’ve got a suitable platform on which to deploy smart client applications
• Welcome to the MSDN Smart Client Developer Center: Rebooted: a message from Jonathan Wells and me (Wells & Sells) about the goals of the Smart Client DevCenter and how to make the most of it

“Bill Wagner takes us through using the more extensible Updater Application Block to automatically install and maintain applications. He also discusses the importance of validation and how to use post processing commands.”

[via theserverside.net]

Mark Levison of Databeacon talks about the first commercial-grade .NET No-Touch Deployment application to be deployed over the internet (at least, as far as he and I know). I asked Mark what his motivations were for using a smart client instead of a web app. These were his reasons:

1. “Integration with Desktop – export to excel, word, send to mail recipient, etc.
2. “The user never has to wait for a round trip to the server. Once the application is up and running everything is done locally, the user is never left waiting by a suddenly slow internet connection.
3. “Our application gets a full blown window with its menu and toolbar, we’re not stuck inside of IE.
4. “Uses the clients CPU do all of work. Our application is graphically and sometimes computationally intensive, if we did all of this work server side, we would eventually run into scaling problems.”

My Windows Forms partner in crime, Mike Weinhardt, pointed out to me this morning that the Windows Forms team has posted their way cool Windows Forms 2.0 samples, including:

• Design Mode Dialog - Mike Harsh
  This is a sample dialog component that allows any form to go into “design mode” at runtime. This component highlights the new, easy to consume, designer infrastructure APIs in Whidbey and has the same usage pattern as other common dialogs.
• Stock Quote Chart Generator - Joe Stegman
  This app uses the sample asynchronously polls a web service for stock quotes and charts the results over a customizable time period.
• MSN Messenger Clone - Scott Morrison
  This is a Windows Forms app that emulates the functionality of MSN Messenger.
• Internet Explorer Clone - Joe Stegman
  This is a Windows Forms app that looks like Internet Explorer 6 and uses the new WebBrowser control.
• Windows Forms RSS Portal - Joe Stegman
  This is portal type application that aggregates RSS feeds asynchronously.
• Outlook 2003 Clone - Joe Stegman
  This is a UI front end that has the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook 2003.

If you didn’t get to go to the Indigo Software Design Review last week (like most of us), Aaron Skonnard puts you right into the middle of it.

I’m downloading this now, but anytime I get a chance to see Don Box or Doug Purdy speak, I want to do it. To see them both together?!? Oh la la!

And after watching them together on the latest .NET Show, I get to see them again next week at the Applied XML Developer’s Conference. How lucky am I? : )

Rob’s been talking about fixing various parts of XAML lately, which is exactly the kind of result you want when a bunch of folks work with your technology and give you feedback on it. So, things will change and get better.

However, Rob isn’t telling us just want the changes are likely to be because, as he puts it, “I’m not going into great detail in the description of our fix because I’d prefer to be the first company to ship our design.  :-)”

Here.

The one where I get to try out the interaction between VS05, Windows Forms 2.0, application and user settings (wahoo!), generics and versioning, discovering that, while this combo still in beta, it’s still pretty darn wonderful.

If I’m doing the calculations correctly, Ryan Dawson is not yet old enough to drink, but he still manages to give the best, most direct, most thorough feedback of anyone in the WinFX/Longhorn developer community (Ian Griffiths is a close second, but he’s got that English polite thing going for him, so it’s hard to know just how much he’s really complaining : ). Ryan’s built apps to test the various pillars and makes his complaints very clear, as in this post about Avalon 3D.

That’s not to say that I agree with everything he says or that the product team agrees, but I wish I had 100 more Ryan Dawson’s banging on the pillars and complaining loudly and clearly so that the product teams can get some crystal clear feedback on what works, what doesn’t and what developers want. If you don’t have a blog, get one or post your complaints on the newsgroups. Come on! Tell us why we suck and what to do to stop sucking! You know you want to. : )

I’ve recently added another castle to my empire by taking on the Content Strategist duties for the MSDN Smart Client Developer Center.

When I step into a new project, my typical mode of operations is to gather goals and issues from as many people as care that I can find, stir it all up with what I think is important, run it up the flag pole, repair the bullet holes a few times and then execute. I’m in the “gather” mode on the SCDC right now and I’m curious what your goals and issues are for the SCDC as it stands today and for what you’d hope it to become tomorrow. Feel free to respond to this post (even anonymously if it makes you feel more comfortable) or email me. The idea is that the SCDC becomes a valuable place for Microsoft developers building Smart Clients of all kinds, but particularly using Windows Forms, the Compact Framework, Visual Studio Tools for Office (did you know that they have a ClickOnce equivalent?) and WinFX.

Well, to be fair, Don leaves some details out, but he wanted to see if he could explain Indigo in 5 minutes or less. Worth the read.

Brian Pepin, Development Lead on the Windows Forms team, has some interesting observations about Avalon and what it means to developers. I particularly like his take on Avalon vs. Windows Forms for control developers and users:

“[Avalon is] needed by control developers everywhere so they can create controls with great usability without hiring an army of Win32 experts. It’s needed by end users because they deserve to have great usability in all their applications, not just the ones that Microsoft threw a bazillion dollars at.”

Mike Harsh, a PM on the Windows Forms team, gives his opinion on several important Windows Forms and Avalon-related questions:

• Is [Windows Forms 2.0 as the last version of Windows Forms] a bad thing from a developer perspective?
• So UI library innovation for Windows Forms is finished.  Does that make it dead? (no)
• Is it worth investing in Windows Forms? (yes)
• Will Windows Forms apps be able to integrate Longhorn controls in under 5 lines of code? (absolutely)
• If I invest in a large Windows Forms app today will I have to rewrite it in 3 years for Avalon?

Joe Stegman, Lead PM on the Windows Forms team, talks about how tight the integration between Windows Forms and Avalon will be

That was interesting. I spent all week getting ready for the big announcement, we launched it on a Friday and then I took off for a week of fun in the sun. And now, it’s taken me a week to catch up with what everyone is thinking. People I’ve found particular interesting are:

• Chris Anderson, Architect on the Avalon team (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Joe Beda, recently formerly on the Avalon team (1)
• Jeremy Mazner, Longhorn Evangelist (1, 2)
• Robert Scoble, MS RSS Filler (1, 2)
• Miguel de Icaza, Architect on the Mono project, a .NET clone (1, 2)
• Robert McLaws, a 3rd party developer (1, 2)
• Jason Olson, a 3rd party developer (1, 2)
• Jim Allchin, Group VP for Platforms (1)

Robert Scoble has done a great job reporting the pulse of the Windows developer community on Friday’s news

Channel9 has the latest Windows/WinFX/Longhorn/WinFS/Avalon/Indigo skinny right from the horse’s mouth: Jim Allchin the Group VP in charge of Windows.

Jeremy contributes to the news about Longhorn and WinFS

Lots of interesting news about the plan to make WinFX available on Windows XP and Windows 2003:

• Press release:  Microsoft Announces 2006 Target Date for Broad Availability Of Windows “Longhorn” Client Operating System
• Note from David Treadwell, the Grand Poobah of WinFX
• Longhorn Developer Center Editor’s Note from yours truly
• New Longhorn Developer FAQ section: WinFX on Down-Level Windows
• New WinFS page on the MSDN Data Developer Center

Tim Sneath shares his experiences building a Longhorn Sidebar, including some tips on how to do the work w/o making your shell unusable (always a plus : ).

Here.

Joe Marini is working with Longhorn, Avalon and XAML on a Microsoft product team and finds that he really loves XAML. This, in and off itself, is not surprising (I mean, that’s what we’re paying him for : ), but it’s interesting to hear the specifics.

Arun Bhatnagar found Longhorn on Mars today:

“I am a software developer who is currently working on C#/.net in Canada. Like so many other developers I am really excited about the features in Longhorn. I am waiting for it and so it is really good to know that Longhorn already exists on Mars. Yes, that’s what USA Today reported today. Read the caption beside the image in this story.”

It’s easy to forget the real people behind any given project, especially one the size of Indigo with Don as the pretty figure head. In this video, Don (via Robert and Channel9) shows you a fraction of the people that work on the team and they reveal their deepest past implementation shames and triumphs. Put a face on CoInitializeSecurity and enjoy.

While not nearly as extensive as Christophe Nasarre’s 3-part look at MSBuild (part 1, part 2

Karsten Jzkdliguloiuski has updated his Avalon 3D Donut to be more delicious and interactive and to fly! Enjoy.

Here. In the interview, Don answers questions like

Mike Weinhardt lists his favorite new features in Windows Forms 2.0, not only bringing my “butt” into it, but making it sound like a good thing. : )

Apparently Eric Gunnerson, confident that C# is now perfect (and who can blame him?) has decided to work on the Longhorn Movie Maker team (and who can blame him?).

I find these strangely compelling, especially this one:

Languages Zen Koan:
“One day Fred was working with .NET. He overheard a programmer say to his superior, “Give me the best programming language you have.” “Every language in .NET is the best,” replied the butcher. “You can not find any language in .NET that is not the best.” At these words, Fred was enlightened.”

Daniel Lehenbauer, SDE on the Avalon team, posts another article on Avalon 3D with fabulous figures

Only4Gurus.com has posted a presentation by Jeffrey P. Snover, a Monad Architect, entitled ”

Joe Beda, development lead on the Avalon team, talks about rich vs. reach and where Avalon fits into this picture.

DonXML has ported his SVG to XAML conversion tool to the WinHEC build of Longhorn and provides the source as well as the binary on his GotDotNet workspace.

Eventually, we’ll be awash in real tools that output XAML, but until then conversion tools are important so that real artists can use the tools with which they’re already familiar, output them into a vector format supported by that tool and then convert them to XAML for use in Longhorn apps.

Peter Stern strikes again, this time with fun XAML t-shirts, coffee mugs and laptop stickers

Here. As I post this, 82 Microsoft employees classify themselves as blogging about Longhorn or Longhorn-related topics

Here.

Looking for the a job in Longhorn? CareerBuilder.com has 5 Longhorn jobs listed:

Peter Stern, one of MSDN’s most excellent user experience and graphic designers, has started up a web site, with a special section just for fun Longhorn-related stuff, including a complete deck of card faces in XAML and his drawings of yours truly from the Longhorn Developer Center in XAML format.

I’ve been corrupting Peter’s thinking toward Longhorn for a few months now and I’ve fabulously happy to have him as the other half of that magical ying/yang designer/developer relationship that Avalon fosters.

There’s a smart client app that I’ve found myself using more and more and loving it: robocopy. The UI for robocopy sucks, of course. It’s a command line app with a myriad of options that take experimentation to really figure out, but once it’s started, it works like a champ, providing progress on each file and, most importantly, retrying once it loses it’s network connection.

What this allows me to do is set up long copy operations bringing down the latest internal Longhorn builds (which are huge) over my uncertain VPN connection. When I hibernate my box, I don’t worry about Robocopy dropping bits or getting confused and when I lose my internet or VPN connection, it retires 1 *million* times before giving up, which gives me plenty of time to notice and reestablish the connection.

Here.

According to Computerworld, Don Norman, the design engineer famous for such works as “The Design of Everyday Things,” is consulting on Longhorn UI design. Cool! I especially love this statement:

In Ian Griffith’s latest post, he shows 3 identical (to my eye) upper case Os next to each other and says, “[t]his clearly shows the shortcomings of that implementation” like a normal human can tell the difference!

The funny thing is, I’ve actually noticed that ClearType on Longhorn was generally better, although I never knew if that was my imagination or not. The thing I love about Ian is that he takes that vague sense of “this seems better” to “let me show you why it’s better and I’ll show you my own implementation of ClearType as a comparison just for fun.” What’s not to love? : )

After weeks of trying research, floating his thoughts on his blog and taking feedback from the blogging community (including several Microsoft folks), Jon Udell has posted an Infoworld article digging into the pillars of Longhorn (Avalon, Indigo and WinFS) and grading them on their implications. He summarizes nicely, I think:

“Indigo, by virtue of its developer-friendly simplification of Web services protocols, could propel Microsoft into the forefront of enterprise middleware. Although Longhorn’s use of Indigo will focus on networks of Windows peers, the technology isn’t bound to Longhorn. Expect to see Indigo-powered ‘enterprise service bus’ offerings from Microsoft and partners.”

“If WinFS succeeds in delivering improvements in users’ ability to organize and manage local information, enterprises looking to drive productivity up — and support costs down — will want it. The wild card will be the level of support for legacy document formats and emerging XML formats. Benefits that accrue only to new WinFS-aware applications won’t tip the scale.”

“Avalon’s TV-like ‘presentation experiences’ clearly favor the home entertainment center over the business desktop. An accelerated convergence of voice, video, and data could alter that equation, and Avalon is designed to help drive that convergence. But enterprises concerned about reach and lock-in will need to carefully evaluate the trade-offs.”

According to legend, half the Windows XP BSODs are 3rd party driver crashes, reducing our “trustworthiness” to the user (trust is more than security and privacy). Yesterday, DevSource reported on a new driver model in Longhorn that will isolate the OS from driver crashes and simplify the development platform to reduce crashes in the first place. Amen, brother.

[via Dactylmatrix]

Daniel Lehenbauer, an SDE on the Avalon team, has a nice explanation of the 3D coordinate space in Avalon with some very illustrative pictures. I’ve got absolutely no experience with 3D and I can follow what he’s talking about. Looks like Daniel should be writing a book…

Tim Sneath, a .NET Architect in MS-UK, lays out the audiences and tensions of MSBuild very nicely in this short summary

Does anyone have a VPC image of Longhorn 4074 (the WinHEC Build) that they could share with me? Every time I try to install, it crashes the VPC

Facetop has been all over the web for a couple of days and I’d like to point out two things about it:

1. This is exactly the kind of thing we’re enabling with the advanced client capabilities in Longhorn that you just couldn’t do in a web app. Until you see something like this, you don’t think of it, but when you’ve got advanced capability in the platform, all kinds of cool stuff happens that the creator of the platform (Apple’s Mac OS X, in this case) never considered. I fully expect the coolest Longhorn apps to come from someone outside of Microsoft.
2. I want it!

Suddenly, after having been worthless/dormant since its inception, the Feedster Windows Longhorn Buzz Feed has begun spouting useful information. Subscribed

Richard Turner, a PM on the Indigo team, answers some of the Indigo questions that came up as a result of his recent Channel9 interview, including:

• Will .NET Remoting go away any time soon? (no)
• Will Indigo Services require IIS? (no)
• We need to support Windows 2000 and XP. Can Indigo Services be hosted on these OSs? (it’s not supported) Will applications running on these OSs be able to act as clients to Indigo Services? (absolutely)
• We expose some of our remoting assemblies via HTTP and host at least one in IIS.  Will Indigo Services offer interoperability with these configurations? (yes) Will we be able to write an Indigo wrapper around a remoting DLL? (yes)

Ashvil DCosta, a software professional in Bangalore writing a book on outsourcing software product development, posts his ideas about how Longhorn, particularly WinFS, will change the way we think about and develop applications

“The Longhorn speech API offers baked-in functionality for voice commands inside the operating system (OS). This is a giant leap forward in the functionality provided by an OS. With the addition of an alternate user interface, products in the future may have a much different mode of interaction than currently used. Through the course of this article, the basics of voice input and output will be shown, as well as the construction of grammar, and how to act on recognition.”

[via Paul Lamere]

Rob Chandler, a Microsoft Help MVP, has posted a look at where he sees User Assistance heading in Longhorn

I’m a big cmd.exe user and was a big Korn Shell user before that, so command shells are an important part of my life and thus, I’m skeptical of new ones. However, I’ve been drooling over MSH (the Microsoft Shell — codename Monad) ever since I first saw it. In fact, when I saw Karsten’s post on getting the Monad bits for Windows XP and 2003, I was much excited. Then, I saw the Fundamentals Pillar topic on The .NET Show, which featured Jeffrey Snover (The Father of Monad) in the back half of the show and I was hooked. The way he told the Monad story motivated me to register for the public beta of Monad via Karsten’s instructions and wait impatiently over the weekend to be awarded permissions to download the bits.

Which I promptly installed on the WinHEC build of Longhorn (build 4074), even though it’s only supported for Windows XP and Windows 2003.

There are two companies vying to be your XAML vendor today to help you get read for Longhorn tomorrow. Mobiform released an updated XAML viewer

The benefit of 3D support in Avalon is not the 3D support itself (we’ve had various ways to do 3D stuff in Windows apps for a while now, including both OpenGL and DirectX). The benefit is the tight integration we get between 3D and 2D elements in Avalon (and we’ll get even closer integration as we move closer to the Longhorn release).

For example, in his Avalon 3D Hit Testing Demo, Daniel Lehenbauer shows how hit testing can move into a ViewPort3D element (the representation of a 3D scene in an Avalon display) into the specific element being clicked. In other words, you can have a Button right next to a ViewPort3D showing a teapot and your app can easily tell which one was clicked. Handling a teapot click is slightly harder than handling a Button click simple because the Button does it’s own hit testing, but the Avalon 3D hit testing supports advanced features like clicking through the handle of the teapot w/o that being classified as a “hit,” all of which Daniel explains nicely in his sample.

I know this is almost a year old, but the permutations algorithm was my favorite from STL and I’ve had occassion to miss it since moving to .NET, so it was nice to find Dr. James McCaffrey’s Using Permutations in .NET for Improved Systems Security on msdn.com. The security implications are interesting, I suppose, but permutations are useful than that (like if you’re trying to crush librarians…).

Over the last few weeks, I’ve fallen in love with the power and simplicity of Avalon data binding. In this month’s column, I start a 2 article series by focusing on the basics of data binding in Avalon and tease you with a screen shot of my Longhorn Solitaire application rebuilt using data binding and styles, the details of which I’ll cover in the 2nd part of the series.

Richard Turner, a PM on the Indigo team, has some advice about how to build web services while we wait for Indigo

Choose an existing technology Foo and imagine a newer, better way of doing the same thing called Bar that’s coming in some number of days/weeks/years. Sean and Scott say that you have the following choices:

A. Blissfully continue to use Foo.
B. Continue to use Foo, but research Bar, and architect for its use once it’s available.
C. Don’t touch Foo with a 10 foot pole. It’s dead after all. Touching it is probably illegal in 46 states.

Robert McLaws makes an interesting observation about the possibility of consuming XAML from a web server:

“So, if Microsoft wants to blur the lines between a web site and an client-side application, what makes you think that the next version of IIS will not support serving up XAML to the client. Instead of getting a limited browser experience at http://www.longhornblogs.com/default.aspx, what if you could get a super-interactive experience with the full power of the client at http://www.longhornblogs.com/default.xaml? What if, on a mobile device, you could use web services to allow location-aware applications ultra-dynamic, serving up XAML UI code along with data? A thick thin-client? Talk about a contradiction in terms. The possibilities become greatly expanded if you beging looking at what’s in front of you instead of looking behind your shoulder at what’s behind you.”

Chris Anderson just did a fabulous job describing what makes Avalon more extensible than existing popular UI frameworks. What Avalon allows is the ability to have a Button instance like so:

<Window>
  <Button>Hello</Button>
<Window>

If you’re using Longhorn 4074 and MSBuild is telling you this, ‘The target “GetOutputAssembly” does not exist in the project.’, then try these steps to solve the problem:

• Backup %windows%\microsoft.net\windows\v6.0.4030\WindowsCommon.Target because you’re about to modify it

• In WindowsCommon.Target, replace all GetOutputAssembly with BuildOutputGroup

• Save and Close WindowsCommon.Target

• Re-run MSBuild and enjoy

“If you’re familiar with data binding in Windows Forms or ASP.NET, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. In this presentation, Chris Sells, Content Strategist for the MSDN Longhorn Developer Center Web site, will cover data binding in Avalon, the new UI stack in Longhorn, Microsoft’s next OS. Chris will cover the basics of data binding and then move into transformers, filters and styling. If you’re going to build UIs in Avalon, you’d be crazy not to use data binding to do it.”

Data Binding in Avalon
6/24/2004, 6:30pm
Portland Community College Auditorium, Room 104
1626 SE Water Avenue
Portland, OR

Some quotes from Anders on Channel9:

“On of the things that we are trying to think about deeply in C# 3.0 is this big gap that I still see between general purpose languages and databases… Anyone who’s building an enterprise app is using both worlds… There’s certainly a lot of progress we can make by truly marrying these worlds… It’s nothing but mismatch. We gotta do away with that.”

Chris Anderson, Architect on the Avalon team, shows the first XAML

Wesner Moise reports on a talk that Jeff Richter did on the .NET versioning story in the Longhorn time frame. Some interesting quotes:

• “a library could not easily be updated since the CLR looked for an exact version match. There was a complex way to solve this problem through policy files; however, even engineers at Microsoft found this approach too difficult.”
• “Microsoft has a new approach for Longhorn and Orcas (.NET v3.0), which divides assemblies into two categories, Platforms and Libraries.”
• “Most assemblies will or should be libraries. Microsoft discourages the use of platform assemblies.”
• “There are actually three types of platform assemblies: System-wide, process-wide, and app domain-wide.”
• “Longhorn will no longer support multiple CLRs. Every managed application will be forced to use the latest version of the CLR on the system.”
• “Whidbey is expected to include an Assembly attribute, AssemblyFlagsAttribute, which allows to developer to specify Library, AppDomainPlatform, ProcessPlatform, SystemPlatform, or Legacy to identify the versioning scheme the CLR uses to load a reference assembly.”

Here.

Rich Turned, an Indigo PM, has some useful things to say about Indigo in his recent Channel9 videos:

I’m really loving Jon’s approach to exploring and questioning the goals and implications of Longhorn:

1. Questions about Longhorn, part 1: WinFS
2. Questions about Longhorn, part 2: WinFS and semantics
3. Questions about Longhorn, part 3: Avalon’s enterprise mission

This post is an oldie, but a goody, in which Kenny Lim talks not only about custom Avalon controls catching property changes so that they can re-render themselves, but also about the custom measurement sequence, which is a core piece of a control that does custom layout like, say, a pile of cards (hypothetically, of course : ).

VisitorVille maps your real-time web site data to a SimCity-like environment that you can use to see where folks are going on your site and how they’re navigating from one place to another. It does the other web traffic kinds of analysis, too, but the ability to watch your visitors in real-time looks pretty darn cool. This is the kind of thing that Longhorn should be good at enabling.

[via Jason Whittingon]

Richard Turner, a PM on the Indigo team, addresses the biggest misperception about Indigo in this Channel9 video.

Bottom line: Microsoft is not taking MSMQ, COM+ or Remoting out of the platform; it’s just that Indigo, which subsumes the features of these other technologies, will do it all better.

Daniel Lehenbauer, an SDE on the Avalon team, has started a wiki providing helpful hints on using XAML as your new 3D file format

Jon Udell, a writer for InfoWorld, begins a series digging into the value proposition of Longhorn with a look at WinFS. Jeremy Mazner, a Microsoft evangelist focusing on WinFS, provides a counter-point

Just to be clear, Marc Clifton’s MyXaml framework for adding a declarative UI mark-up language to today’s .NET framework is not a clone/sub-set of Microsoft’s XAML or Avalon targeted at Longhorn. In other words, while MyXaml provides a number of the benefits of declarative UI mark-up for building smart/rich clients today, MyXaml is not a way to write WinForms code today that will seamlessly turn into Avalon code tomorrow.

The reason I mention this is because I’ve seen some folks get a bit confused by the use of “Xaml” in the name (Marc is using XAML as the generic Extensible Application Mark-up Language and not as related to Microsoft’s XAML).

Jason Zander, a Microsoft Product Unit Manager, not only points out the implementation problems we have with being able to unload .NET assemblies, he recommends AppDomains as the solution you really want anyway. And then, when his commentors dissent, he’s right back in there asking for more information.

Have you got opinions on this topic? Make hay while the sun shines!

Ian posted a fun little snippet of XAML showing off the new support for image effects on anything that Avalon renders, not just images:

  xmlns:def=“Definition” Text.FontSize=“24″>
  This seems clear enough.
 
   
     
   
    This is considerably less clear.
 

We’ve got answers.

If the reality is anything like the concept videos, I want it!

Wei-Meng Lee takes a first look at the WinHEC build of Longhorn for O’Reilly. It’s a user-centric look at Longhorn, but I learned stuff. : )

As Wesner notes, the Longhorn SDK lists 3 distinct Avalon applications types: Windows/Forms apps, multi-page apps and documents. The beauty of Avalon is that it brings so many together, apps/documents, multi-window apps/multi-page apps, text/images/video/audio, 2D/3D, etc. And to answer Wesner, Microsoft will provide editing tools for Avalon beyond Notepad (someday…).

Greg Schecter, one of the designers of the new support for 3D in Avalon available in the Longhorn WinHEC build, provides a nice overview and some other links to Avalon 3D resources:

• Greg Schechter’s Introducing 3D in Avalon and 2D/3D Integration
• Basic 3D in the Longhorn SDK
• Joe Beda’s WinHEC report, including a screenshot of an Avalon 3D sample

Here. The one where I learn that DevelopMentor was my own personal speed reading course

Here.

The Avalon team has posted their WinHEC slides:

Ian blathers on about the power for vector graphics for a while then hits you with this link demonstrating the power of vector graphics

ZDNet asks Bob Muglia, the Sr. VP in charge of Longhorn Server, questions like: What does MS

Doh! I jumped the gun on this post. The WinFS team doesn’t think that StoreSpy is ready for prime time, so I’ve taken it down. Bad dog. No bone!

Carl IM’d me to see if I could call into a long conference call. I said that I would, but couldn’t ’

Kam Vedbrat, a member of the Longhorn User Experience team (aka the Aero team) talks about the warm, fuzzy tasks that they went through to come up with “

Today Jonathan Hodgson has posted a very cool article ostensibly about implementing Squarified Treemaps in Avalon, but he goes much further than that. First, he shows us what his Avalon implementation of Treemaps look like, including providing the source and a Maslan-ese video showing off his creation for those folks that don’t have the Longhorn PDC bits.

Then, Jonathan goes compare standard grid and graph visualizations to Treemaps and to describe the intimate details of the Treemap algorithm.

Karsten posts about some cool P2P samples he found

Kenny Lim has posted the source to his WinHEC-compliant Avalon NNTP Reader

Sam Druker, Development Team Lead on the WinFS team, has a series of videos on Channel9 talking about a variety of WinFS topics:

• Where do the attributes/metadata come from that WinFS exposes to the shell and to custom applications?
• How pictures could be tagged based on calendar appointments and picture timestamps.
• What kind of search experience will WinFS enable in Longhorn?
• How an existing application, like Outlook Express, could be updated to take advantage of WinFS.
• And most importantly: how developers should prepare today for WinFS tomorrow.

The right thing happens, imo, but I’m hardly unbiased. : )

Here.

After Business Week reported the death of WinFS, some folks have been justifiably worried that such a cool feature would, in fact, be missing when their copy of Longhorn showed up at their door. Today Toby Whitney, the Group Program Manager of the WinFS team, stepped in to report that WinFS was alive and well:

The WinHEC build of Longhorn just seems so much more stable than the PDC

Nathan Dunlap takes us on a tour of his favorite new things in Avalon in the WinHEC build of Longhorn (4074), including a sneak peak an updated GelButton, his love affair with the  new Grid panel, his lust for real 3D

I had no idea that there were so many declarative platforms for UI. The XUL Grand Coding Challenge 2004 shows off 10

Dave Massy has amassed some information about the new WinHEC Longhorn build (4074) and it’s available on the Longhorn Developer Center in the ”

If you can’t be at WinHEC to check out the latest Longhorn information, Paul Thurott’s got you covered with his WinHEC 2004 Show Report and Photo Gallery.

Jim Allchin’s WinHEC keynote was entitled, “Beyond Better, Stronger, Faster: Innovating around Experiences,” and in it, he talks about the experience that Longhorn is going to enable and how the technology supports that experience.

BillG’s keynote @ WinHEC this year was entitled “Seamless Computing: Hardware Advances for a New Generation of Software,” and is available in transcript form for your enjoyment.

Here.

In case you’ve heard the rumors about a new drop of Longhorn coming to WinHEC attendees, you’ve heard right. The Milestone 7.2 (M7.2) drop of Longhorn will be given to WinHEC attendees this week and will be available to MSDN Subscribers for download RSN*. The plan is to provide regular LH Milestone drops to the community as we have them, regardless of whether they really provide more functionality/stability or not. That way, we keep you guys in synch with what we’re doing and you can give us more relevant feedback.

The Windows Forms team has posted some sweet screenshots and overviews of the major new features in Windows Forms 2.0, including two I hadn’t heard about before:

• Client Configuration using type-safe per-user serialization of application settings
• Document Outline to show how controls are nested in a container

It has been hell keeping this to myself as Lutz has been sending me beta drops for the last coupla months for the completely reworked Reflector 4.0. Two very cool things about this release of Reflector:

1. It supports any version of the .NET Framework, so it works great on Longhorn and Whidbey
2. It has a replacement for the Class Viewer tools in the .NET SDK (wincv.exe) that I came to depend on in my writing and that hasn’t been updated for WinFX, so Reflector 4.0 is even more important to me than it would normally be

It’s interesting to hear what the Mozilla and Gnome guys are thinking about to rally their forces to combat Longhorn. The interesting thing about it for me, a developer and user of software, is that when MS

If you don’t know him, Miguel is the architect of the Mono open source project whose aim is to implement the .NET CLR and the Framework Class Libraries on Linux (and other places) so that .NET apps can run on OSes other than Windows.

In this essay, Miguel comments on the importance of Longhorn:

If you can’t wait for Solitaire, he’s a game you can play on Longhorn today, Deepak’s sample implementation of tic-tac-toe in C# and XAML. It also comes with a nice little write-up for your development edification and the source. Enjoy.

It’s my belief that the big deal with Avalon is that it gives us much more powerful tools to deal with data visualization and manipulation. Towards that end, Ward turned me onto Edward Tufte

Roman Kiss has built a little Indigo logging tool that uses Indigo’s ability to drop arbitrary code into the message pipline. Very handy for seeing what’s really going on at the message level w/o changing any of your code. Personally, I’d like to see an Avalon version (or even a Windows Forms version) just

ASP.NET 2.0 gets a ton of deserved press, but the combination of the doubling in functionality of Windows Forms in .NET 2.0 and the new and improved No-Touch Deployment, now called ClickOnce, make smart clients an enormously compelling alternative to web apps when you know that the client is running Windows and .NET.

Michael Weinhardt, who took over my Wonders of Windows Forms column and is the co-author on the 2nd edition of my Windows Forms book, has dedicated himself to shouting the value of Windows Forms 2.0 from the rooftops. Subscribed.

Michael Herman caught onto WinFS’s real nature last year and I’m just now catching up. He points to a paper describing ontologies and points out this about WinFS:

Keith “Mr. Security” Brown kicks off a series of security articles on Longhorn. In this piece

Here.

This week, Christophe Nasarre, one of the best reviewers on my Windows Forms book, has written a 3-article series on the new command line build system and the new build core of Visual Studio 2005: MSBuild. In this installment, Christophe starts from the ground floor, building the most basic .proj files and then exploring the advanced features you need to control your builds.

I work closely with Vic and Steve on the strategy for Longhorn content and activies, so I’m planning to tune it to today’s .NET Rocks.

In the 2nd installment of my series rebuilding Solitaire using Longhorn technologies, I dive into 2 of the 5 Avalon families, specifically controls and panels, and build something that is at least approaching how Sol is supposed to look.

Robert Scoble and I walked around MSDN last week with a camera and here’s the first snippet where I talk about my experiences building Solitaire for Longhorn. Watching it now, it seems to me that I need to chill a bit and maybe take a breath now and again. : )

Karsten continues his dig into the Fundamentals Pillar of Longhorn by describing the 3 main points of the new configuration settings infrastructure of Longhorn:

1. Configuration schema, which allows settings to be schematized based on XML
2. Configuration engine that has a suite of APIs for reading and writing configuration settings
3. Optimized configuration store that can be synched with legacy stores such as the registry, INI files, etc.

I’ve been silent myself on the real status of WinFS simply because I didn’t know enough to really say (although I did ask some of my internal friends who knew more to speak out). One person I didn’t even think to ask was Jeremey Mazner, a Longhorn Technical Evangelist who spends quite a bit of time WinFS.

Jeremey’s bottom line: none of the cuts affect the message from the PDC or the slides or code samples that he uses to show off the benefits of WinFS. He goes on to provide supporting evidence from inside and to speculate on where the stories to the contrary came from in the press.

Karsten J rebel’s against the lack of coverage of the Fundamentals pillar of Longhorn, sketching an overview of why the Fundamentals in Longhorn are cool and also delving into a specific feature he likes (the nextgen Longhorn Event Log).

Also, if you’re looking for more Fundamentals resources, check out the Fundamentals Pillar page on the Longhorn Developer Center, which lists the Fundamentals PDC Talks, several fundamentals articles (including a nice overview of ClickOnce for Longhorn) and the WinFX Fundamentals newsgroup.

Channel9 has some interesting quicky videos of Joe Beda covering a number of Avalon-related goodies:

• Managed vs. unmanaged, how much of Avalon was done that way?
• What 3D capabilities will Longhorn/Avalon provide?
• What hardware will Longhorn/Avalon need?
• How should developers prepare for Longhorn/Avalon?
• Managed vs. unmanaged, how much of Avalon was built in .NET?
• Are all of Avalon’s APIs available to .NET programmers?
• Is Avalon a way to take over the Web?

Carter’s got another concept video for us, this time for manufacturing.

In general, if you haven’t seen the concept videos, they’re a fantastic way to see what the heck we’re trying to enable with Longhorn.

Jason Olson, an enterprising 3rd party, posts a look at the benefits of knowing about threading when building an entire UI stack from scratch. Instead of requiring you to transition from a worker thread to the UI thread to talk to a control, Avalon lets you grab the UI context that owns the control and party on:

void ShowProgress(int secondsElapsed) {

There seems to be a common misconception that since Avalon windows/pages are/can be declared in markup (XAML), it must be a web killer/reach solution. It’s not.

In this short video, Joe Beda, answers the question of whether Avalon is meant to replace HTML/the web (it’s not) and what’s Avalon’s message of “best of the web/best of Windows” message is really about, e.g. ease of deployment for Avalon apps like web apps, accessing central services for data and functionality (using web services instead of client UI generation), etc.

Channel9 has a Longhorn Wiki and on it, Adam Kinney has started a list of Longhorn Blogs

I gave a talk at the Twin Cities .NET User Group in Minneapolis in January and I met a guy there building a web sit to crawl .NET

Wow. I’ve seen bits and drops of Whidbey (I’m limited to builds that work on Longhorn), so haven’t seen the grand, overall vision of it. In the latest Microsoft Developer Tool Roadmap, they whole darn thing is laid out and the new stuff goes on forever! Details are presented for IDE

Jason Nadal has posted an RSS reader that uses the Longhorn text-to-speech APIs to actually read you the morning news while you do other things. Includes source

Here.

Kevin Lindsey has been exploring Avalon and posting some things he didn’t expect. I love how he posts pictures of what he expected alongside of what he actually got:

Ryan has posted a nice, consise write-up of getting started writing help in Longhorn.

Apparently Robert had a conversation with a customer that was holding up .NET adoption because Longhorn was coming with Avalon. If you’re already planning on building Longhorn-only applications, more power to you, but most folks will need to write apps that run on other versions of Windows for some time to come. For those folks, we have .NET and Windows Forms today and for at least another decade. Let’s do the math:

• According to recent industry rumor, Longhorn won’t ship ’til 2006.
• According to our internal OS folks, a new OS isn’t ubiquitous enough to target it as a base for new consumer application work for 6 years.
• Even 2 years after .NET was available everywhere, people are still actively doing the MFC and VB6 thing.
• 2 years ’til 2006 + 6 years ’til ubiquity + 2 years not doing the new thing = 10 years of good, strong life left in Windows Forms at least.

Here.

Robert Hess, that .NET Show guy, talks about why he’s so into Longhorn in the recent .NET Shows lately:

Markus Mielke, a PM on the Avalon team, provides some performance tips on Avalon inheritable properties, centrally shared resources and property triggers

Marc Clifton, a concerned 3rd party, provides thoughtful criticism of XAML.

Chris Anderson, Avalon Architect, takes Marc’s criticism and provides a thoughtful response.

Today, Joe Marini, a Microsoft PM on a project that dare not speak it’s name, posts a blog reader built entirely in XAML, i.e. no .NET code.

Last week, Chris Anderson, an Architect on the Avalon team, showed us that Avalon requires no XAML at all if you don’t want to use it.

The tables are well and truly turned from when I interviewed Carl with Rory acting as color man to where Rory is hosting and I’m just there to fill a seat

Marc Clifton, author of the MyXaml open source project, publishes a series of articles exploring opportunities for improvement for the Avalon architects to consider:

• Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML?–a look at “tag names are class names”
• Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML? — The joys of VisualTree
• Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML? — The case of the missing collection
• Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML? — Decorating the house of cards

Don Box expands on his explanation of HTTP.SYS, IIS and XPSP2, including providing a .NET

While it’s true that a new preview version of Visual Studio 2005 is available for MSDN

In this piece, Karsten digs into some of the advanced features of Indigo, building the code to start from scratch on the client and server, then adding the code to add state management, reliability to the messages and asynchronous messaging.

The most concise description of what I love most about Monad, the next-gen Windows command line, comes from Jeffrey Snover, a Microsoft Architect, in a Peter Coffee article:

“We keep the idea of ‘A pipe to B pipe to C,’ but we pass .NET objects instead of structured text. We can pass ADO, other kinds of objects, and we can create reflection-based utilities.”

Marc’s post made me connect VB

Jason Olson talks about dock, absolute and relative positioning in Avalon and shows XAML

Don Box talks about how Indigo services are hosted and how that interacts with IIS (or not, as the case may be).

Adam has a nice, concise sample of property triggers in Avalon, which are a XAML

Tom Barnaby has some tips for preparing today for Indigo tomorrow.

Dan Crevier from the Office team pines for WinFS when they were implementing Mac Office 2004.

Read chapter 6 of Introducing Longhorn for Developers, where Brent dives into the Indigo pillar of Longhorn, including an architectural overview, programming web services, programming remote objects, securing Indigo endpoints, reliable and durable messages and transactions.

Thomas Rizzo, Director (!) on the SQL Server Product Management team, kicks off his WinFS column with an overview of why we need it and what it is

Here. If you’re a C++ programmer and have questions or concerns about where C++ is going in Longhorn, you need to be at this chat on Monday, 3/15 from 11a - 12:30p PST

I’m just happy to see security + Windows = good for a change. : )

Yasser Shohoud digs into Indigo even further, this month using “channels” to build different kinds of message exchange patterns into your applications, including one-way, duplex (incoming and outgoing messages on different ports) and request/reply, as well as adding reliability.

Here.

Josh Williams, an SDE on the CLR team, kicks off his 64-bit blog with an introduction to WOW64 and what it means for .NET programmers. Here’s the summary:

Paul Thurrott finishes his 2-part series of interviews of Hillel Cooperman and Tjeerd Hoek, Longhorn User Experience mavens. The interview covers just how hard it is to make an entire OS usable and just how much work MS does to get it right.

However, one thing that Hillel said struck me particularly as someone fairly new to working at MS:

Paul Thurrott is more of a user guy then a developer guy, but you have to be a user before you can be a developer, and his stuff is often interesting. Now he’s created a spot on his site to gather his Longhorn content. My only question: where’s the dang RSS feed?!?

If you read Ian’s article on Avalon Graphics Composition before the fireworks, you missed a wonderful discussion of how Avalon compares with Apple’s Quartz and Quartz Extreme. Not only does Ian respond to the ever popular “Doesn’t Mac OS X already do today what Longhorn will do tomorrow?” with a resounding “No!” but he does it in such a thorough manner, that you can’t help be admire it.

You go, Ian! : )

This time, Ryan digs into the RTC stack in Longhorn to build an IM app to enable synchronized browsing and chatting. Includes source code and a meaty write-up, including Ryan’s complaints about the current RTC

I’m really getting to like Benjamin’s Mitchell’s blog as a Reader’s Digest of various issues that he’s following. This time, he summarizes advise from across three MS architects providing guidance on where to draw boundaries between services

Jesus Rodriguez provides an overview of the WinFS data model, including using it for searching and notifications.

Mobiform is one of two 3rd party vendors that have been building a XAML parser that runs under the current version of .NET. Today, Mobiform went one better by releasing a working preview of an interactive XAML Editor that runs under the current version of .NET. Plus, the XAML that I created in the editor works on the PDC Longhorn bits.

Now there’s something other than the 101-Key Text Wizard to use when designing XAML for Longhorn. Mind you, what Mobiform has put together isn’t Illustrator or even Paint Brush yet, but it’s an amazing start.

Normally I like to consume something before I recommend it, but his stuff is always so good that I’m going to point out Ian’s new piece on graphical composition in Avalon before I’ve even read it. Here’s the conclusion to whet your appetite:

“The new composition model in Avalon removes many of the visual design constraints that applied to most Win32 applications. It also improves performance by making more effective use of modern graphics cards, reducing the frequency with which the OS has to call the application back to keep the display up to date, and enabling a much higher quality of user interface.”

Love markup but can’t wait for Longhorn/Avalon/XAML? Check out Joe Stegman’s WFML (Windows Forms Markup Language).

[via Chris Anderson]

Jeremy Mazner has posted another in his series of compelling WinFS scenarios. Personally, this is one of my favorite, simply because it talks about the massive developer benefits of having an object-based stored built into the OS

The slides from the European tour showing off Longhorn are available on codezone.info. The usual topics are covered, i.e. Avalon

Rich Turner, PM on the Indigo team, answers lots of FAQs related to Indigo and how to prepare for it today, including:

• How do I prepare my code and systems to ease my adoption of Indigo?
• Which current technologies should I use, where and when?
• How will Indigo interoperate with systems based on existing platform and technologies?
• How much of my code will I have to change to migrate my code to Indigo?
• How will Services Perform & Scale?

Rich Turner, a PM on the Microsoft Indigo team, has a pretty firm answer to the question of whether .NET remoting is dead: no

My call for Indigo bloggers was very successful (although most recommendations came via email), providing several interesting Indigo web blog possibilities. On the WinFS side, I only know about Mike Deem, and he seems to have gone into hybernation. Does anyone have anyone else that they’d like to recommend as a WinFS blogger

One of the features that Jason built into his ImageStack application was animated zooming using timelines, which he describes in some detail here.

Jason Nadal has posted a sample application for viewing a stack of images in Longhorn (with code

Lori Pearce, the Matriarch of the Longhorn SDK, describes what goes into the LHSDK and how it’s built

Brian McMaster from the Windows Forms team provides an article on how to automate Windows Forms applications for testing via tools like Visual Test. Check it out if that’s the kind of thing you want to do.

In this concept video, Carter Maslan explores how we imagine that Longhorn’s capabilities could be applied to a financial services application.

Looks like CodeProject is getting into the Longhorn act with a nice Hello, Longhorn sample by Deepak Kapoor.

Before watching this episode of The .NET Show, I used to think that Don’s speaking ability made the Indigo team somehow special, but after watching this episode on Indigo and seeing John Shewchuk and Steve Swartz wax elopquent about the high level interop and functionality goals of Indigo as well as the programming model goals, I think Don is just the guy that’s willing to be publicly naked (not that I can really point that finger : ).

John and Steve provide *such* a compelling story. If you haven’t heard the Indigo story or even if you have, this is the place to get it.

David doesn’t get many questions to answer about the present and future of .NET, but the ones he gets asked, he answers well. My favorite:

“As for code identity, I love the vision. But I’ll acknowledge that it hasn’t taken off as we’d hoped. When people tried to write partial-trust apps, it always turned out there was one thing they needed to do and couldn’t. We have to do more work to find the right scenarios where you can do a functional smart-client app that runs in partial trust and doesn’t require the user to micromanage permissions. In WinFX, I want to make it viable to write partial-trust apps that can do real things.”

I’m always nervous about going to see the teacher about my kids’ performance this year. They’re both very bring, but the older one is easily bored (like his father) and the younger one is social and emotional charged (like his mother). Also, I’m of the belief that at this age (9 and 8), the parents still have an enormous influence over their children, which includes how well they do in school. All of that is wrapped up into that 20-minute meeting at those tiny little desks and it’s nerve-wracking.

On the other hand, I find myself pleasantly surprised by Jon Udell’s .NET Report Card. To be sure, there is room for improvement (Don always says, “The largest room in the world is the room for improvement” : ), but two As and two Bs is pretty damn good in this age of very high expections, so I’m a proud 2nd cousin right now (the product teams are the real parents, of course).

Ryan Dawson posts a nice sample showing the basics of a drawing program in Avalon, including a floating toolbar and the ability to draw and select lines, rectangles and circles. He also provides the source.

BTW, Ryan’s pretty darn prolific on Longhorn and I recommend his blog in general. Also, if I remember correctly, he’s 19, so you’re getting pure enthusiasm and uncensored truth. Recommended.

Markus Mielke, one of the guys making Avalon go just as fast as possible, posts his guidelines and goals for Avalon performance.

Sometimes I get aspiring programmers stumbling onto my web site and asking me how to get started having no programming background. I can’t really tell them to do what I did, i.e. spend 4 years programming Applesoft Basic, so instead I recommend “The Visual Basic .NET Coach,” which is supposed to introduce .NET

Ian Griffiths has a very nice piece about the new drawing model in Avalon and how it differs from the drawing model that’s we’ve known and loved since 16-bit Windows. It also includes such tidbits as a reference for the currently under-documented Path.Data attribute. Highly recommended.

Since it’s inception, I’ve been a big fan of the .NET Show and I’ve seen most of the episodes. Now, the host, Robert Hess, has got himself a .NET Show-related blog. Subscribed.

Here.

Right on, Benjamin:

Alex Kipman, PM on the MSBuild team, was kind enough to provide several tutorials on MSBuild

It’s been about 5 months since the Longhorn Developer Center was launched and I’m curious what you guys think of it. Do you like it? What about it don’t you like? How could it support your current Longhorn development goals better? What can I do for the budding Longhorn developers that we’re not doing? Don’t be shy; call it like you see it.

Benjamin Mitchell does such a good job summarizing Jon Udell’s WS Alphabet Soup article

The one and only time that I ever met Tim O’Reilly, I turned into fan-boy, telling him how I used to be a Unix guy and I would just buy every single “animal book,” even if I didn’t know what the topic was because the quality of the books was so high that I knew I needed to know whatever was between the covers.

Now a days, ORA produces too many quality books to purchase (or even read) them all, but I’ve been very happy to see them turn more and more of their attention towards Windows, where I’ve put all of my developer energies for more than a decade. In fact, I’ve written one book for ORA myself and I’ve got two more in the works, so I continue to be a big fan. Today they launched the Windows DevCenter, where they are concentrating and aggregating all of their considerable Windows juice. And, of course, they have an RSS feed. Subscribed!

On Monday, March 15th between 11am and 12:30pm PST, the VC++ product team will be hosting a chat on what to do with your existing C, C++ and MFC applications in the Longhorn time frame

Here. By popular demand, Nikhil Kothari, a PM

Ryan Dawson turns his attention to Indigo, building a client and server and then adding security and reliability. In his writing, he also points out a number of pitfalls for you to avoid when getting starting with Indigo in the PDC

Long before Longhorn, we’ll have Whidbey and an updated Windows Forms (as well as a bunch of other updated things, but I like Windows Form : ). This article enumerates some of the updated controls in Windows Forms Whidbey. Also, stay turned for an MSDN

Jeremy Mazner presents his second scenario for WinFS, this time describing his idea app for event management that would be cake to implement using WinFS. In fact, I’m pretty sure you could do the whole thing in the shell.

On a related note, I was watching an internal training video on WinFS yesterday and it excited me in a way that’s not appropriate for humans to feel about technology. The enumeration, update, serialization, relationship, extensibility and notification models just all seem so *right*. I’m looking forward to another drop of the bits that enables me to extend WinFS so I can really start building stuff.

Steve Kirk has updated the Architecture Developer Center with a series of streaming video presentations about the core architectures that motivated Longhorn

If you need a look at Longhorn, but you couldn’t make the PDC (or you’re just dying for *another* look at Longhorn), WinHEC in May is the place to be

In the most recent Microsoft Architecture Update newsletter, David Hill defines just what the heck Microsoft means when the sling around the term “smart client.”

Rory has graciously allowed me to volunteer as his code/slide monkey at his Portland Area .NET User’s Group meeting talk on Thursday, 2/26 at 6:30pm. The topic, in his words:

Steve Maine has written a very nice piece on anonymous delegates and higher order procedures in C# Whidbey. Enjoy. I know I did.

Jason Nadal posted a description of the DataTransformer. A DataTransformer is a handy way to transform data-bound data into another format, like a number into a formatted string or a string into a background color. Make sure to download the B sample

If you haven’t gotten the Indigo bug yet, Benjamin Mitchell lays out a nice, easily digestible Indigo intro on what all the fuss is about. I especially like the picture showing all communications roads leading to Indigo while maintaining the advantages of multiple styles of programming. Looking forward to reading more, Mr. Mitchell.

Adam Kinney is at it again, this time with a sample RSS Aggregator that uses Avalon’s adaptive flow layout and some WinFS. Things are starting to get interesting…

Karsten *Januszewski* has some answers to questions about Indigo as related to ASMX

On his quest to find “non-bad WinFS scenarios” (ironically, because he was called out by another Microsoft employee

If you don’t already know the basics of .NET’

Kenny Lim posted an article about Visual Trees in Avalon that was down right inspirational. In fact, I spent all morning building a little app that will dump the portion of a

If you care about Longhorn, start first with Whidbey. According to Scott Guthrie, the first Whidbey beta will be available in June.

[via Kent Sharkey]

Jason Nadal builds a useful smart client application in Longhorn for language translation. It’s a simple front-end to a web service, but it’s the first real custom app for Longhorn I’ve seen that doesn’t have to do with demonstrating or building for the platform.

Here.

Nathan Dunlap and Jonathan Russ work together as designer and coder to build splitting bars in Avalon:

Ironically, his page is filled with bugs…

[via Stuart Celarier, the real Longhorn Stuart]

Ian Griffiths posts the beginnings of a XAML editor (it supports squares and elipses and saving, but not loading XAML, so no source yet). Especially interesting, however, is how he handles zooming. He wrote an explanation with source on that bit.

BTW, if you haven’t figured it out yet, Ian is quite the Avalon boy. If you’re into such things, you should subscribe to his blog.

Here. This looks *very* cool. Can’t *wait* to see the source code. Hurry up, Nikhil! So long as it compiles and runs, we’ll be forgiving. : )

While Rory’s virtual pet sidebar tile sample isn’t especially useful for a corporate desktop (although maybe a “virtual employee” version could be used to screen potential managers before they’re inflicted on unsuspecting “real” employees… : ), it does show off the intended usage for the sidebar: stuff that you absolutely, positively have to look at all day long.

As an example of what I mean, consider a typical example: the weather tile. Do you really need to know what the weather is all day long? Do you need to know it enough to take up valuable screen real estate to show it to you? I know I don’t.

Not only does Kenny show a cool little XAML animation sample, he does it in my favorite writing style.

I’ve always loved writers that start with something I’m familiar, in this case, a star defined in a hunk of XAML, and then build it up to add new features, in this case color, opacity, scale and rotation animations. The reason I love this style is that if I’m at a computer, I can follow along, folding the new features into my code and learning how things work by doing it. Or, if I’m reading the piece in the bathtub (which happens surprisingly often), I can build the code in my head (at least, ’til I get one of those cool waterproof military laptops).

Adam Kinney’s at it again, this time with a sample of changing an Avalon object’s animation properties dynamically to develop an interactive game-like effect. Very cool.

“A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”
Unknown (to me : )

In this installment of the Longhorn Foghorn, I start my Longhorn implementation of the venerable Windows Solitaire. There is no interesting code yet, but I have explored some of the same decisions any developer will face when starting their first Longhorn application from scratch. Enjoy.

Ryan’s at it again, this time with a custom Avalon control that adds spell-checking to the built in TextBox control.

Here. Robert Scoble, Longhorn Evangelist at Microsoft, is interviewed on Microsoft’ search engine plans, including those provided in Longhorn by WinFS. Take this with a grain of salt like all advance info on Longhorn, but interesting nonetheless.

Ian and I are writing an Avalon book for O’Reilly and Associates together, but he’s way out in front of me, writing cool stuff like how to get rubber band selection outlines in Avalon. He also starts with a wonderful history of the XOR technique we used to use in Windows and why we no longer need it. In fact, we don’t even need XOR in Windows Forms and GDI+ today, although lots of folks don’t know that.

The key trick in Ian’s implementation is putting a hidden element into your XAML document so that when it’s time to do the rubber hand outline, you can show it, move it and resize it based on where the mouse is, hiding the Rectangle again when the mouse button is released. This lets Avalon take care of the drawing, making this technique a thing of beauty.

Here. Mitch Walker, the Terrarium guy at MS

Here. In this concept video, Carter Maslan, Longhorn evangelist, shows off secure, peer-to-peer networking using pub/sub in Indigo, Longhorn’s identity management, organizing data using WinFS metadata relationships, using DRM

As I’ve mentioned, the reason we’re put the Longhorn preview bits out so early is so that we can get feedback at a time when things can still change. So, when you see Brad Abrams, Chris Anderson or any of the other dozens of MS PMs and Architects hanging out on the web ask for feedback on what they can do to make things better, take them up on it! Don’t be shy. If you hate something, tell us so we can change it! If you love something, tell us so we don’t change it!

Even if there isn’t any specific blog entry to which you can reply, start or your or post something to the WinFX newsgroups. We’ve got members of the Longhorn team looking everywhere for your feedback. For example, yesterday Dino posted a theory he had about developer reaction to some particular aspect of the new Longhorn programming model. Rob Relyea saw that post and today he’s soliciting more feedback on XAML compound property syntax and XAML as a whole, the latter specifically becase of Dino’s post.

Rob Relyea, a Lead PM

Dino’s gotten some interesting feedback from his XAML-based articles. Apparently he’s hearing from “real programmers” that don’t want to “recycle themselves as web designers.” This feeling Dino has dubbed “un-programming” and it’s the idea that XAML takes away the need to code.

XAML is most of what’s needed to build trade-show apps, that’s true. But look at your apps today: How much of your web app is HTML and how much is C# or VB.NET? How much of your Windows Forms app is in the InitializeComponent method and how much is code? While XAML can also be used for general-purpose object creation and initialization, as far as the UI of your app is concerned, all XAML does is replace the HTML or InitializeComponent method. The power of what Avalon can do is separate the UI from the code so that trained designers can work on the specifics of the UI, while real developers work on the specifics of handling events and hooking up the business logic and talking to the back-end datastore.

Last time, Ryan Dawson posted a fun Avalon sample showing system information using graphics and animation. Today he’s back exploring the use of WinFS to build a tiny CRM app.

Karsten wraps up his book, “Developer Guide to Migration and Interoperability in ‘Longhorn’”, with a chapter on recommendations for preparing to make the best of your Windows Forms code under Longhorn

Karsten Jkdjflksjdf (or however you spell his last name : ) pointed out two excellent security articles today. The first is “Developing Software in Visual Studio .NET with Non-Administrative Privileges.” Longhorn applications are going to run much better assuming fewer privileges, so getting yourself out of the habit of testing and running your own code as an Administrator is something you can do today to prepare for Longhorn tomorrow.

Another excellent article on this topic is from Keith Brown, a DevelopMentor colleague and security arch-Nemesis of mine (he never did like my plan of branding “bad” applications by setting the first bit to 1 instead of 0… : ). Item #7 in Keith’s online book in progress, A .NET Developer’s Guide to Windows Security, is entitled “How to develop code as a non-admin” and well worth the read for the practical advise as well as Keith’s pleasant writing style.

Here.

Oliver Drobnik extracted a question out of a Q&A session with BillG asking about speech recognition in Longhorn. After BillG makes a very funny comment, he talks about the current state of speech recognition and synthesis today and a bit about the plan for Longhorn.

Rob Relyea, a Lead PM on the Avalon team, posts some history of XAML as well as a description of how it’s compiled into BAML and then into code. He also talks about CAML, which is used today in the PDC bits, but going away in the future.

I love these kinds of posts (and these kinds of articles) because they provide insight into what the designers of a particular technology had in mind, making it so much easier to learn. Having spent years of my life reverse-engineering the intentions of the COM designers out of the header files (because the docs and marketing materials actually pointed us in the wrong direction), it’s great when the folks behind the technology spill their guts. Thanks Chris and Jeff and Rob (and Mike and Don and the rest of the MS bloggers).

The shell-meister himself, Dino Esposito, digs into the one of the most prominent of the new shell features in Longhorn — the Sidebar — by showing you how to add your own tile, including how to create the flyout and properties views and how to extend the context menu. Sample code included. Enjoy.

Here. It’s interesting to see an Internet-based company talk about using smart client technologies to provide their customers with a richer experience than they could provide over the web. I roamed the country for years talking to folks about Windows Forms and No-Touch Deployment for their internal stuff and they ate it up. When Whidbey ships and provides ClickOnce capabilities for Windows Forms apps

I don’t know what a “

Robert Hess kicks off a series of Longhorn episodes on The .NET Show with a Longhorn overview

Wes muses on whether XAML could become a “standard” document format for even custom types. Certainly, if a document was serialized in XAML using custom types instead of in a custom format, it would save some translation to/from the Avalon object model…

If you’ve noticed Stuart Celarier stalking the WinFX newsgroups lately, it’s because he’s been gathering the best stuff for use in his new Longhorn Developer FAQ.

Plus, Stuart’s got all kinds of cool FAQ features, like expanding/contracting items and URLs for each category and for each item. Even cooler, the source document is a WordML document that Stuart authors in Word and then translates into HTML for the MSDN site using an XSLT. It’s a very cool model for FAQs in general and I know that Stuart’s planning to share the FAQ framework on his site.

Here.

“Carl interviews developer and author Brian Noyes. Brian has focused his studies and development efforts on Smart Client development, and in this interview brings us from AutoDeployment of Windows Forms applications into ClickOnce, the next-generation deployment and update technology from Microsoft that will ship with the .NET Framework 2.0. We talk about the issues around AutoDeployment, and how Microsoft is addressing those issues with ClickOnce.”

Ryan Dawson built a fun system stats utility showing off the Avalon’s animation of object rotation, position, translation and opacity. And more importantly, he describes how he did it.

Tim Tabor points out a new find, a mapping from Win32 API functions to the closest equivalent in the .NET Framework class library

Here. I just learned today that one of the most interesting conversationalist in the Windows development world has started a PDF

Here.

Here. Alex Kipman, a Microsoft PM

Brent Rector’s PDC book on Longhorn/WinFX is now available for purchase. We’re posting the chapters on the Longhorn DevCenter, but atoms are nice, too, especially when they come in the shape of a book.

[from Adam Kinney’s blog]

I was data binding an ArrayList of objects of a custom type, e.g. class Person { public string Name; public DateTime BirthDate; public int Teeth; }, to a DataGrid today and everything working great ’til I wanted to filter one of the columns out (who cares how many Teeth a person has?). I was all set with table styles and grid styles like so:

void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) {
  DataGridTableStyle tableStyle = new DataGridTableStyle();
  tableStyle.DataGrid = this.dataGrid1;
  tableStyle.MappingName = "Something???";
  this.dataGrid1.TableStyles.Add(tableStyle);

  string[] columns = { "Name", "BirthDate" }; // Skip Teeth
  foreach( string column in columns ) {
    DataGridTextBoxColumn columnStyle = new DataGridTextBoxColumn();
    columnStyle.HeaderText = column;
    columnStyle.MappingName = column;
    tableStyle.GridColumnStyles.Add(columnStyle);
  }

Here. Nathan Dunlap posts another great example of Avalon effects. This time, he shows adding drop shadows to text in Avalon.

Folks have been posting Longhorn code samples on their blogs, which is great. Also, I’ve been collecting bigger code samples on the Longhorn Developer Center on the Tools & Code Samples section as well as with the PDC talks.

Also, I just noticed a Longhorn sample in the unedited section of CodeProject.com, one of my favorite user contribution sites.

Here. I’m a big Rory Blyth fan, so I’m downloading this show as I type this. Enjoy.

Here. Ian Griffiths shows some of the basics of XAML

Devleap.com, a site dedicated to Windows development for Italian developers, has added a new Longhorn section

Here. Robert Wlodarczyk posts another sample dedicated to showing off the glowing image effects in Avalon. Sweet.

Robert Wlodarczyk, a software engineer on the Avalon testing team, has posted a most excellent sample showing off the wide variety of effects you can apply to images in Avalon. Very cool.

In talking about recent developments at Microsoft, Mary Jo sums up my own feelings nicely:

“Windows is cool again, thanks to all the excitement around Longhorn.”

Here. Brad Abrams, Lead PM

Here. Patrick Thompson, a PM

Here.

In this chapter, Brent Rector provides his overview of WinFS, including the programming model and how to access items from the WinFS API and via SQL directly (the latter sounds a lot more fun that it is : ).

Here. Jeff Bogdan, one of the chief architects on the Microsoft Avalon team, kicks off the new Avalon column that he shares with Chris Anderson

Here. Yasser Shohoud, a member of the Indigo team at Microsoft, kicks off his new Indigo column with a walk-through of how to get started programming Indigo using the Visual Studio .NET

The new .NET site TheServerSide.NET

Here. This month, Mike Weinhardt takes over for me on the Wonder of Windows Forms column so that I can concentrate on Longhorn. Mike is the co-author on the 2e of Windows Forms Programming book and a co-author with me on a couple of Windows Forms

Here.

Joe has a particularly dim view of where we’ve come with GUIs in the last 10 years. In fact, it’s much more dim than my own view. On the other hand, I think he nails one point:

Holy cow! Windows Forms Programming in C# is #10 on the list of best-selling Microsoft-related books. I’d like to thank the academy…

From the same folks that brought you dotnet247.com comes winfx247.com

ClickOnce is the install-on-demand technology for Longhorn, but makes it’s debut in the next version of the .NET Framework, codename

Here.

 : )

Don “

Here.

As I’ve mentioned, one of the biggest problems I see with Longhorn is deciding exactly what to do with all of the new capabilities. So, when Carter Maslan showed me some internal training videos showing off some uses of Longhorn in potential real-world applications, I just knew we had to get them out to the world.

Here. I haven’t heard this yet, but I just know it’ll be fun. Once you get Don started talking, it’s hard for me to stop and interesting things almost always pop out. : )

Here. Inspired by my pending interview of Don Box

For those of you unfamiliar with Don’s reference, a “roach motel” lets roaches in, but never lets them out. That’s exactly what most apps do today, i.e. take data in from users or import routines, but never let it out again. As Don states, one of the chief benefits of WinFS is that data that apps store in it will be available to other apps, thereby letting the roaches out of the hotel. Where Don’s analogy breaks down is that in the case of application data, letting the roaches back out of the hotel is actually a good thing. : )

Here. Sean

We’re not even to beta yet, but we already have not one, but two 3rd party XAML viewers targeting existing versions of the .NET Framework. Wow.

[From Don “XML” (donxml.com)]

We’re not even to beta yet, but we already have not one, but two

In a recent interview of Don Box by Mary Jo Foley, I expressed my disappointment over the dullest of both the questions and the answers. Uncharacteristically ducking criticism, Don provided details of my frequent stays at his house suggesting an unhealthy love of his pets (which I love the normal amount, I promise). While this was amusing, it doesn’t give anyone any more information than Mary Jo’s interview did.

Anyway, talking about it on the phone just now, Don agreed with me that the interview turned out much less interesting than he intended and promised to make amends. Specifically, he said, “Chris, send me 10 questions and I’ll answer them.” So, here’s your chance. Reply to this post with the hardest hitting, most revealing questions and I’ll pick the best 10 to send along to Don. Don’t hold back — all questions are fair, although I’ll focus first on Indigo, then Longhorn, then technology in general before getting to Don’s own love of his pets (for example). Here’re some questions to seed your thinking:

Scott Rosenberg appreciates how important blogs are when it comes to exposing Microsoft inards as Longhorn is developed. Except for the fact that Scoble’s not a programmer and I’m not an architect, he does a pretty good job.

With the increasing number of folks pinging me about submitting Longhorn articles, I thought I’d point folks to the MSDN Article Submission Guidelines, which describe how to establish a relationship with MSDN

I’m in Minnesota over the holidays, so I thought I’d drop in on the Twin Cities .NET User Group for a short discussion of Longhorn. Please keep in mind that this talk is purely shelfish on my part — I learn best by telling the story.

Here.

Mary Jo Foley interviews Don Box on the origins of Indigo, the status of SOAP, the definition of SOA and Miguel de Icaza. Unfortunately, Mary Jo doesn’t dig for any dirt and Don doesn’t volunteer any, so it’s a relatively boring interview. Luckily, it’s short.

Here. Give Microsoft formal feedback on Longhorn so that we can act on it more effectively.

Here. Matthew Ellison, from WinWriters.com, discusses his highlights of the new help system in Longhorn.

Here. And plus they talk about XAML

Here. Roger Jennings provides a nice overview of the major bits of Longhorn for folks that haven’t seen them yet.

Here.

Apparently it’s Longhorn day for MS videos:

Here. “In this episode of the .NET Show we focus on how ‘Longhorn’ was presented, and received, at the PDC. In our first segment we talk with key players in the Longhorn project, Brad Abrams, Chris Anderson, Quentin Clark, and Pablo Fernicola about the main messages that they are hoping developers at the PDC understand about Longhorn. We then switch the tables and talk with Richard Hale Shaw, Simon Stewart, and Robb McLarty, a diverse set of attendees of the PDC and hear straight from them what they think about Longhorn, and how it might affect their development efforts moving forward.”

Here.

And than Nathan posts another sample showing off the various kinds of resources to be defined in Avalon and how to define them on top of one another. I’m loving this guy!

Here. Nathan Dunlap kicks off his new Avalon design blog with a sample on how to clip video to arbitrary shapes. I don’t know for what I’d use this, but it’s nice to know it’s there. : )

And from heaven, the thing that budding Longhorn programmers most need falls to earth. Nathan Dunlap, a designer on the Avalon team, has taken up blogging. He’s covering design tips as someone that understands Avalon *and* design inside and out. Welcome, Nathan! Subscribed.

If you haven’t seen it, Xamlon is a .NET 1.1 implementation of Longhorn’s XAML. And while I was under the impression that it was just XAML, i.e. a language for declaring and defining objects, it looks like Xamlon is an attempt to implement Avalon, too. I haven’t downloaded it, but looking at the Xamlon samples and code online, it looks like a subset of Avalon. Interesting…

Here. I can’t believe a missed the first piece of Ian Griffiths’s new column! Ian is a DevelopMentor instructor, co-author on three books with me (two still in development) and a long-time friend. Check out his opinion on WinFX and what it means for developers and please point me at the RSS

Here. FTP

Here. Of course, consumers won’t care that the Electronic Showbox photo organization, editing and sharing software was built from the ground up using the .NET

If you’re overwhelmed by the huge number of PDC talks, I’ve split out the Longhorn-specific talks

Adam Kinney seems to be that rare combination of graphic designer and coder that I want to be to survive in the brave new world of Longhorn. I’m following his blog avidly.

Drew Marsh describes the internals of the XAML dotted attribute syntax that I described a few days ago as well as contrasting it with the existing .NET IExtenderProperty model.

Here.

Drew’s documenting what he discovers as he digs into Avalon.

Don Box simplified my XAML code using resources and styles. He also illustrates another XAML-ism that I’m coming to love: dotted element names. When you see something a dotted element name in XAML:

<GridPanel>
  <GridPanel.Resources>...</GridPanel.Resources>
  ...
</GridPanel>

Here. I’ve always been a big fan of wacky analogies to illustrate points and Steve’s got a good one.

Here.

Here. Duncan [1] points out Tim Dawson’s set of WinForms controls, all of which are either free or cheap for commercial apps. Not only are the controls well-designed and flexible, they’re also documented with a set of tutorials and provide an extensive design-time experience. I don’t know how someone can make a living giving this stuff away, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy Tim’s generosity. [1] http://weblogs.asp.net/duncanma/posts/40415.aspx

Here. I read a post yesterday that pointed at Wesner Moise, an ex-Microsoftie, and now I’m hooked. I’m enjoying how he applies his technical riguor to Longhorn. I also want to know about SoftPerson, his software company that

Here. The one where I fall in love with XAML

Here. Markus Mielke, a PM

Here. ComputerWorld corralled an Orbiz developer and took down his observations about Longhorn from a developer point of view. It’s interesting to see the perspective.

Here. If you missed the PDC

Here. XAML

Here. The one where I declare an official, immediate need for all those unemployed web site designers to get to work on Avalon ASAP

Here. SYS-CON interviewed me and a bunch of my friends at the PDC

Here. I’m going to save myself a lot of posts and just tell you now: if you’re into Avalon, read Chris Anderson’s posts.

Here. Chris Anderson, an architect on the Avalon team, talks about the history of the Avalon team, including how it was formed, the goals for Avalon and the rearchitecture a year before the PDC

Here. While things will most definately change before VS.NET Whidbey is released, this document provides a great list of new features in both C# Whidbey and VC

Here. To save myself linking to nearly every single one of his posts, I’ll just tell you now: If you’re doing WinFS or curious how it works or what it means, you *must* read Mike Deem’s blog.

Here. If you haven’t noticed, the Longhorn SDK

Here. Normally I wouldn’t point this page out, because it’s *unofficial* and *unsupported*, but some folks have used the guidance on this page to fix issues with the PDC

Here. Here’s the third and final part of my document-centric applications in WinForms piece. In this part, I present the FileDocument component from Genghis [1] and show how it can be used in SDI

Here. Under Whidbey, VC++ supports both CLR

Here. How cool is this? Infragistics, UI

Here. If you have questions or comments about Longhorn/WinFX development, be sure to post them on one of the WinFX newsgroups. Digging through the recent activity, I’m hard-pressed to find a post that isn’t addressed by a member of the appropriate MS

Here. Mike Deem, PM

Here. Paul Thurrot digs deeply into the PDC

Here. Brad Abrams, a Lead PM

Here. While it’s not Longhorn specific, certainly the changes made to security for users and application developers in WinXP SP2

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here. Mike Deem posts his opinion on why WinFS is so important. +1.

Here. Jeff Key shows a sample custom shortcut for expansion, but he doesn’t show what you get. Digging through C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

Here. For those of you that don’t like writing raw XML

Here. Luke wanted to add a new feature to SharpReader (which was just updated today [1]), so he turned to Genghis. Come one, come all. Genghis offers free features for everyone! BTW, the new feature was toast windows. [1] http://www.sharpreader.net

Here. I think Don wins the prize for most obfuscated

Here. I have no idea how this SML

Here. Watch Brad Abrams and learn the object-oriented, managed API

Here. Check out the Longhorn Architecture Diagram and the WinFX Namespace Diagram from the PDC

Here. Don

Here. Serge posts a list of what he thinks makes WinFS cool along with links to more info.

Here. Want to develop deep extensions to VS.NET as a Visual Studio Integration Partner for free? Want to develop those extensions using managed code with new managed samples and a new wizard? Then check out the VSIP

Here. Looks like the folks that video taped the break-out sessions at the PDC

Here. Because of increasing popularity, Carl Franklin asked the community for some help mirroring the audio from his .NET

Here. ExtremeTech has a review of the PDC

Here. Don Box says it nicely:

Here. John Carroll says it nicely, I think: “Longhorn will be the first operating system where ALL

Here. The one where I look behind the curtain, see the wizard and like it.

Here. In general, anyone interested in XAML/Avalon/Longhorn should just subscribe to Chris’s blog: http://www.simplegeek.com/blogxbrowsing.asmx/GetRss?

Here. I’ll be hanging out in the Longhorn newsgroups, as will MVPs and the product groups. Come on, come all!

Here.

Here. Not all PDC

Here. Paul’s site has all kinds of Longhorn screenshots and videos from the PDC

Here. One of the major goals of Windows has always been to provide a platform on which ISVs and shareware authors can make money and on which corporate developers can save money. Towards that end, I’ve set up an experimental section of the Longhorn Developer Center called

Here. I’m very pleased to have Eric Sink of SourceGear fame writing for the experimental Business of Software section [1] of the Longhorn Developer Center. He’s not only a successfuly ISV

Here.

Here. My favorite bit: “Certainly we believe in this next wave, and we’re not just saying that, we’re showing with our investment level how sincere we are about that. Over the last four years Microsoft’s R&D budget has more than doubled, and that budget is focused on the things you’re going to hear about today. It’s focused on making

Here.

Here. DevelopMentor launches their Longhorn mailing list.

Here. Lots of details from PC

Here. If you haven’t seen it yet, or weren’t able to get the CDs from the PDC

Here.

Here. Don Kiely provides a brief overview of the pillars of Longhorn.

Here. Before they hit it big on the stage during their keynote demo, Chris Anderson and Don Box recorded their now famous

Here. Catching up on Longhorn in the news. This article provides a brief discussion of each of the pillars.

Here. The new stuff in Longhorn ain’t just for developers. In addition, the Microsoft Windows Hardware Central site has a bunch of resources dedicated to building drivers in Longhorn, including details of the Driver Developer Conference coming up in November.

Here. Sorry for the delay in announcing this, but I had a devil of a time posting blog entries from the PDC

Here. Chris Burrows compiled a list of recommended .NET

Here.

Here. I love the idea that I can marry fast performing graphics with managed code. Don’t know if it actually works well enough to build Doom, but I imagine I’ll know after watching this episode of The .NET

Here. Robert lays out why it’s important that MS

Here.

Here. ScottGu describes his ASP.NET Whidbey demo at the ASP.NET Connections conference. I’m no ASP.NET programmer, but that *is* one tasty dish…

Here. The VS.NET teams has placed a

Here. Jason Clark digs further into C# generics, including the niftiness of constraints and why they’re so important (nicely told, Jason!).

Here. Rory Blyth, potentially the most entertaining writer in the bloggesphere, has offered to be your own personal PDC

Here. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I’m really looking forward to the Windows Forms pre-conference tutorial I’m giving with Rocky Lhotka at the PDC

Here.

Here. While the .NET

Here. There’s only 11 days left on this: “Microsoft is pleased to offer Visual Studio .NET

Here. This site is cool. It rolls up helpful info on my book, along with blogger mentions. Nice.

Here.

Here. Watch this space.

Here. Got something to say about Longhorn or .NET

Here. Just testing…

Here. Hilarious PDC03

Here. Speaking at the PDC? Going to the PDC? Missing out on the PDC? Check out the PDC

Here. Steve Hoag gives a nice overview of various kinds of Windows Forms drag-n-drop, including text, pictures, files and between lists. The code is in VB.NET, but we’re all one big happy family!

Here. Does anyone have any PDC

Here. From Eric Gunnerson.

Here. Don’s glad that the PDC

Here. Dr. James McCaffrey provides a nice introduction to

Here. The one where I can’t believe that .NET

Here. Jason Clark on generics in the CLR

Here. Brent Rector is my long-time friend and co-author of ATL

Here. Atif Aziz built a generic VS.NET code generator shim that allows you to build a code generator that plugs into VS.NET by implementing a single method. Cool.

Here. By request, O’Reilly and Assoc. has posted the Format Specifiers appendix from C# in a Nutshell by Drayton et al. It’s a wonderful reference to the String.Format/ToString format specifiers that I’m constantly searching for on MSDN

Here. You haven’t lived

Here. Includes a document manager, docking windows, menus and toolbars, outlook bar and wizards. Looks cool and they’re free. Enjoy.

Here. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should check out Magic: The User Interface Library for .NET

Here. Shawn Morrissey captures Eric Sink in a rare photo op.

Here. The one where I have my first shoot on the .NET

Here.

Here. With the support for scripting built into .NET

Here. Don has a nice write-up of delegates vs. interfaces as points of extensibility. Bottom line: delegates are more flexible than interfaces.

Here. Lutz Roeder (of Reflector fame) has started a workspace around WYSIWYG

Here. With DX9

Here. These guys demonstrate not only a cool application of Managed C++, but also what a fabulous bridge that MC++ is between the unmanaged and managed worlds. Folks that haven’t moved to VS.NET because they’re doing C++ are *really* missing out.

Here. Aurigma has posted the beta for a COM

Here. I just know that folks are going to need to be able to convert between VS.NET 2002 and 2003 projects and solutions for a while yet, so here’s a free, extensible conversion tool to do the job.

Here. This article comes with the full source for hosting the WinForms Designers to enable form design in your own app. To my knowledge, none of this stuff is supported, but that doesn’t make it any less cool! [mikedub.net/GalleySlave]

Here. ChrisT continues to make progress in the

Here. From Matthew Mastracci: I just released the fifth alpha version of my free, open-source .NET

Here. I don’t know how long it’s but up, but the C# version of my WinForms book is up on Amazon. If you were a reviewer, please post a review. Thanks!

Here. From Andrew Webb:

Here. From : A handy ComboBox control for developers!

Here. From Keith Wedinger: Java SDK

Here. From Bernard Vander Beken: A new list where Agile Software Development using the .NET

Here. ChrisT got finalizers working. The wonder of the ref-counted programming model in .NET

Here. Easily one of the questions I get asked the most once folks start using no-touch deployment (NTD

Here. From Sundaranarayanan Subramaniam: Binarymission offers SmartConsult .NET

Here. From fish: Helps you to find and use the code snippet.

Here. From Sundaranarayanan Subramaniam: Binarymission proudly presents BinaryDatePicker .NET

Here. From Pär: Connecting Borland C#Builder to DB2

Here. Adam Nathan posts the source to a new .NET

Here. From Keith Wedinger: Java development has a number of advantages over traditional environments which output machine language. .Net has the advantage of hindsight, however, and has improved on Java in a number of areas.

Here. Lutz Roeder, the author of Reflector.NET, caves in and starts his blog. And what a way to start: he posts a decompiler plug-in for Reflection.NET. Welcome, Lutz.

Here. I’ve updated XsdClassesGen for VS.NET 2003. For those of you unfamiliar with it (it’s never been as popular as CollectionGen for some reason), XsdClassesGen is a VS.NET Custom Tool that generates C# or VB.NET wrapper class source code from an XSD

Here. I’ve updated CollectionGen with code to support both VS.NET 2002 & 2003. It has no dependencies on any VS.NET design-time DLLs, so one binary works for both versions. If you’re building custom tools, this should form a good base to support both environments.

Here. From Jan Tielens: Hippo.NET is a tool for streamlining the build process of .NET

Here. Sam Gentile and I wrote a piece on building WinForms apps in MC++ using the new designer support in VS.NET 2003. Unfortunately, it acquired some small errors along the publishing path, e.g. STA

Here. From jt:

Here. Yet another signal of the inevitability of .NET

From Randy Ridge: New OpenGL binding for .NET from the CsGL people, supporting GL

Here.

Here. If you liked Don’s Essential .NET

Here. Visual Studio Magazine posts the results of their latest salary survey. Average Visual Studio programmer salary is $76K

From Keith Wedinger: It is now available as a download for MSDN Subscribers. There are 3 versions: Enterprise Architect, Enterprise Developer and Professional.

Here. Due to popular demand, we’ve released the source code to RegexDesigner .NET

Here. From Andrew Webb: Though does anyone use the SDK

Here. And the hits, they keep on comin’…

Here. Full type information is *so* cool. In this case, it provides the full list of changes from .NET

Here. From Olero Software: Olero Software has released ORM.NET version 1.4 ORM.NET - .NET

Here. From Andrew Webb: Broader reach than ECMA

From Mitch Gallant: Chris, Great article on .net resources at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnforms/html/winforms02202003.asp The MSDN articles are rather confusing on resources, but your article clarifies a lot. Here is an easy to use drag/drop utility to view any assembly resources: http://pages.istar.ca/~neutron/ViewResources/

Here. From Andrew Webb: from Don Box’s spoutlet

Here. Part 1 of 2 of Michael and my treatment of integrating WinForms components and controls into VS.NET.

Here. At OOPSLA

Here. My 3rd installment of the basics of serialization, this time covering how to customize the serialization process.

From Matthew Mastracci: I just released the third alpha version of my open-source .NET profiling application. It supports everything I’ve thrown at it so far (multi-threaded programs, NAnt, SWF

Here. This article presents the new features in WinForms, including new namespace features, new IDE

Here. Continuing the discussion of serialization in .NET

Here. This is the first of a 3 part series I wrote as an appendix to my WinForms book because I couldn’t find the topic of object serialization covered adequately elsewhere in any of the popular texts. This part covers the basics of text and binary serialization for simple types.

Here. From Craig Andera: I’m sure someone, somewhere has already written this, but I figured it out on my own today, and it’s just too cool not to share. Basically, it’s a bit of code that lets me store objects in my application or web configuration file, and all I have to do is write the type that holds the values.

Here. Here’s how my full quote [1] was cut down for publication. That’ll teach me to be thorough. : ) [1] http://www.sellsbrothers.com/spout/#mspatents

Here. From Shawn Wildermuth: This is a link to Chris’ new article on how he figure out why ThreadAbortException was being thrown by using the Rotor code…Like he’s always said, the real documentation in in the source code…

Here. From Pierre Nallet: I just released eXtensible C# (XC

Here. From Michael Box: Understanding .NET

Here. From Juan Esteban Suarez: Academic project. Free download from www.doteasy.addr.com. Abstract:

From David Taylor: I just read Chris Sell’s “

Here. From Dominic Cooney: This library provides similar functionality to the .NET

Here. From Ingo Rammer: Starting with February 2003, I will publish a free, bi-weekly newsletter on distributed programming with .NET

Here. From Sébastien Ros: This new tool is an object-relational framework fully integrated in VS.Net. Its main features are true UML

Here. From Mihies: The Oracle Data Provider for .NET

Here. TaskVision is a full-featured WinForms sample that supports auto-updating over the web and online and offline functionality, as well as some other cool .NET

Here. eXtensible C# provides a set of compile-time attributes to do things like inject code (like to check for a null value), analyze code at compile-time and even obfuscate. Very cool.

Here. From Sorin J: This may be yesterday’s news, anyway, Microsoft has applied for a patent covering many .net related technologies.

Here. From David: A new microsoft sample that demonstrates the following: Application offline and online model Application update model via HTTP

Here. A nice summary of what’s going on when you attempt to run two versions of .NET

Here. From Matthew Lewis: First of a series outlining the core namespaces and classes that cohesively implement the standards based XML

Here. It’s nice to see that somebody is tracking and publishing bugs on my most favorite technology, although I suspect that many are as yet unlisted…

From Sam Gentile: For people who were reading my .NET Radio Blog. I have moved to an ASP.NET based solution. The new location and feed are at: http://dotnetweblogs.com/sgentile/

Here. From Jim Corbin: Hunter Stone has created a useful tool for managing one or multiple Web.Config XML

Here. From Ben Kohn: See demonstrations of a variety of useful techniques and approaches that can be leveraged to help build powerful ASP.NET Web applications and Web Services. Learn about: debugging, tracing, event logging, performance counters, error handling, Web form session state, sending email from, file upload and others.

Here. If you haven’t done .NET

Here. Eric Smith has integrated his CodeSmith code-generation tool directly into VS.NET. Very nice.

Here. A VS.NET add-in that provides the following C# refactoring operations: -Encapsulate Field -Extract Method -Inline Temp -Introduce Explaining Variable -Move Method new -Rename Field -Rename Method -Rename Property -Rename Local Variable -Rename Parameter -Replace Magic Number with Symbolic Constant -Replace Temp with Query It seems to be implemented in Java and then ported to .NET

Here. An interview of Peter Hallam, the dev. lead for the C# compiler. Most of the interview covers stuff you’re likely to already know, e.g. the design goals for C# and the CLR

Here. From Shawn Wildermuth: Chris has a new article up on http://ONDotNet.com on Hosting your Windows Forms controls in COM

Here. This is a pretty comprehensive, and pretty even-handed, comparison (Java gets kudos for doing some things better than C# and vice versa). If you’re still curious about how the other half lives, check it out, but I’ll bottom line it for you: C# and Java are pretty much the same language. The real differences are in the respective libraries, not the languages.

Here. From Hun Boon Teo: This is just for a laugh, don’t take it seriously. Alternatively access it at http://www.geocities.com/hunboonteo/misc/silly.htm . Regards.

Here.

Here. From Vaclav Novak: Push your ASP.NET Web Forms to the extreme. This session focuses on advanced tips and tricks for ASP.NET page development, including UI

Here. From Hun Boon Teo: Another research paper from Wolfgang Schult and Andreas Polze, part of abstract:

Here. From Hun Boon Teo: A research paper from two German scholars, part of the abstract:

Here. I just like to read JasonW, but this one was particularly nice. He refutes some pretty wild claims from one member of the Java community. Along these same lines, I spent a day of onsite consulting having a .NET

Here. A somewhat wordy list of what’s new in VS.NET 2003. It figures that just after I’d learned to use the Designer for event handling that MS

Here. In writing the resources chapter of my WinForms book, I found that there was no single utility for displaying the resource contents of assemblies, .resx files and .resource files (even embedded .resources files) in a way that made sense to me. So, I built one. Enjoy.

Here. I just stumpled onto a set of very cool .NET

Here. From Chris Sells’ Marketing Guy: The Pioneers of WinForms PhoneCon is a new method for attending Chris Sells’s popular DevCons. The whole unit can share a PC

Here. I did an interview a long time ago and just noticed that my most fun quotes were actually printed in USAToday. Cool!

Here. From Jesse Ezell:

Here. From Ben Houston: This simple wrapper, written in Managed C++, allows for developers to make use of NVIDIA

Here. My friend and author of Pragmatic ADO.NET has released a package of his tools to the community, including: -A general library of ADO.NET utilities -A new release of my Improved DataSet Generator -A Stored Procedure Wrapper Class Generator Shawn says that contributions are welcome.

Here. I’m not much of a graphics programmer, but I know folks have been anxiously awaiting DX9

Here. From Hun Boon Teo: A master dissertation by Howard Kim from Dept. of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin. His paper covers topics such as AOP(AspectJ,Hyper/J) in Java and .NET

Here. From Jesse Ezell:

Here.

Here. From Alintex: Alintex Script Host lets you run scripts written in three Microsoft .NET

Here.

Here. I’m a big fan of both the MapPoint .NET

Here.

Here. Another answer from the VS.NET Info Center Q&A Forum describing how to start a command prompt and the file explorer in the directory of the current project.

Here.

Here.

Here. From Ryan Dawson: I had talked earlier in the week to Chris about an application I was developing, and I said I would post it as a news item when it was finsihed (I should say just started, I am not close to being finished). If you are interested in advancing this program, please contact me -rd933@msn.com.

Here. From Spencer Harbar: The .NET

Here. From Jesse Ezell: Ximian released mono 0.17 today: “Many new features as well as plenty of bug fixes. Many new System.Data providers and a more mature System.Web (ASP.NET) which can now be hosted in any web server. A simple test web server to host asp.net has been released as well.”

Here. From John Bristowe:

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here. A new episode of The .NET

Here.

Here. From Hun Boon Teo: From MSDN

Here. From Andrew Webb: It’s in stock at the PC

Here.

Here. A little essay on the WinForms Validating event.

Here. That cool auto-scaling that WinForms does when moving between system font settings baffled me

Here.

Here. From Hun Boon Teo:

Here. From Hun Boon Teo: Article by Dominik Gruntz from Journal of Object Technology (Nov-Dec 2002 Issue), this article shows some of the subtle difference between C# and Java.

Here. From Andrew Webb: The whitepaper (a Word file) is now available. And the Demo Files link, previously dead, now works.

Here. Sam Gentile’s got the scoop on the Everett release updates to VC++, which he lists as: -98% ANSI/ISO Compliance -Forms Designer for Managed C++ -Security Features -Optimizer Improvements particuarly in floating point He’s got the details. Check it out.

Here.

Here. Shawn Wildermuth’s new book, Pragmatic ADO.NET: Data Access for the Internet World, is awailable now. Shawn’s a long-time friend of mine and I wrote the forward to the book, so I’m hardly unbiased, but it rocks! Enjoy.

Here. From Jesse Ezell: That release of Visual C# will include four new features: support for

Here. According to the AW

Here. From Razvan Caciula: Microsoft announced the availability of beta 2 of the Microsoft .NET

Here.

Here. From Jesse Ezell: Project Mono can now execute SQL