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?!? : )

Wow. This is nice of us…

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.

Every time I added an element or attribute, I saw the results in real-time. If I screwed up the syntax, I got a red error message in the status bar. I can’t tell you how much pleasure I got adding and elements and setting the Grid.Row and Grid.Column attributes on my cell elements, watching things move around the screen and figuring out Grid the content model. It was fabulous! All development should be like this…

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, Zhanbo Sun, an SDE/T on the Avalon team, not only shows an example of this translation, but provides the code so that you can see it for yourself. Maybe Chris Anderson will add this feature to XamlPad so that you can see it interactively or maybe Gaston Milano will add it to his VS XAML Viewer so that you can see it inside of Visual Studio… [hint, hint]

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). Both are presented in a form that’s easy to use with his ClickOnce XamlPad Clone. Enjoy.