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.”

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

Rod Paddock is starting up a Geek Dinner for Sioux Falls, South Dakota and asked that I slobber a little Sells juice on it. Consider yourself sauced, Rod.

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:

1. “Today, use Windows Forms v1.1 and observe the Microsoft Patterns and Practices guidance for maintaining clean separation between UI and other application logic.
2. “When Avalon v1.0 releases (scheduled for mid-2006), we recommend that applications looking to differentiate their user interface such as Web sites and graphically intensive applications such as complex data visualization look closely at Avalon. Other applications should continue using Windows Forms.
3. “Following the release of Avalon 1.0, the next version of Visual Studio following Visual Studio 2005 will contain tools and designers to support Avalon. At this point, customers should start to move their new development efforts to Avalon and use the Windows Forms/Avalon interoperability features.”

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?

From securityfocus.com:

“It appears that the overall quality of code, and more importantly, the amount of QA, on various browsers touted as ‘secure’, is not up to par with MSIE; the type of a test I performed requires no human interaction and involves nearly no effort. Only MSIE appears to be able to consistently handle [*] malformed input well, suggesting this is the only program that underwent rudimentary security QA testing with a similar fuzz utility.

“This is of course not to say MSIE is more secure; it does have a number of problems, mostly related to its security architecture and various features absent in other browsers. But the quality of core code appears to be far better than of its ‘secure’ competitors.

“[*] Over the course of about 2 hours; I cannot rule out it would exhibit problems in a longer run.”

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.”