I don't know what Amazon is doing -- except possibly trying to stimulate blog entries -- because I could detect no advertising in there most recent home page movie short, “Tooth Fairy,” but I did enjoy it.
“Granted, there are plenty of Microsoft teams that are still opaque when it comes to their roadmaps. (Office team, are you listening?) But Microsoft has taken some in 2004 in the right direction, customers, analysts and other company watchers seem to agree.”
Frankly, I’m pleasantly surprised at how far Microsoft has come opening up to the world. I hope we’re at a critical mass where it just can’t be stopped, but as an engineer, that’s hardly surprising. : )
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.
P.P.S. I don’t mean to call the Avalon guys crooks. Those guys work super hard to build the right thing and they’re dying for the feedback. That makes them *very* different than Nixon, who really didn’t want the feedback he got. : )
Ian Griffiths illustrates the core concepts in Avalon animation by implementing a custom font size animation class. Basically, "animation" in Avalon means "changing an object's value over a range in a given time," e.g. changing a font size from 10 to 72 in 4 seconds or an X coordinate from 10 to 100 in 2 seconds. Animation seemed so fancy to me until I broke it down in my head in this way.
Since our credit scores have become such a big part of our lives, it has become federal law that everyone be able to get a free credit report annually. As of December 1st, 2004, the western states are eligible and the web site lists when other groups of states will have access. For a blow-by-blow, check out the write-up on the Personal Finance Blog.
Karsten says: "Check out http://www.therhogue.com/WinFX/ for some more Avalon 3D samples. Robert Hogue is an amazing developer and these are definitely worth checking out."
