Joe Stegman, Lead PM on the Windows Forms team, talks about how tight the integration between Windows Forms and Avalon will be, including hosting Windows Forms controls inside of Avalon, Avalon controls inside of Windows Forms and sharing a data binding model. In other words, developing on Windows Forms is a wonderful way to get tasty managed UI goodness today and long into the future, whether you'd like to target Avalon and/or Longhorn in the future or not.
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)
In the meantime, I’m re-aligning the Longhorn DevCenter content with our new goals, making sure to keep on my toes as things suss out (we’re far from completely sussed on the details or implementations of this announcement, which is why watching internal and external commentary is so interesting right now).
I was just listing my activities for the week before Burning Man and amazed even myself:
Shopping for and celebrating my wife’s 36th birthday
Helping to prepare for and then watching Sells brother #1 test for his Jr. Brown belt in karate (he was amazing)
Hosting my aunt and grandmother on a very rare 4-day trip
A day-trip to the beach
Celebrating the birthday of Sells brother #2
Coordinating the update, from my house and at the last possible moment, of more than 100 pages on microsoft.com to reflect the recent announcement of WinFX being made available on down-level versions of Windows (this included 3 all-nighters)
Preparing for and running a 2-day garage sale of the stuff I pulled out of my house over the last 8 months in my own personal episode of Clean Sweep
Packing for 5 days in the desert (I worried about survival and my wife worried about having enough costumes…)
Of course, after that I spent a week at Burning Man, and today we’re cleaning the playa out of everything, preparing the boys for school, hanging out with the relatives for Labor Day and celebrating our 13th wedding anniversary. Starting tomorrow, I have to figure out what to do with the Longhorn Developer Center now that WinFX will be available on down-level windows, co-author two Avalon books and one Windows Forms book and run the Applied XML Developer’s Conference 5. Should be fun. : )
