MSDN shipped their part of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 at about 12:30am on Tuesday morning. Sara has a nice summary of the new MSDN Product Feedback Center that I think folks will find particularly satisfying:

“At the MSDN Product Feedback Center, you can submit bugs and suggestions. You can search through other people’s submitted bugs and suggestions. You can vote for your favorites. You can share workarounds. And, you can see feedback and details directly from folks on our product teams. Oh, and you can get notified when the status of an issue you’re interested in changes.”

In other words, developer feedback to the product teams for the supported products is no longer just an email or a post, but an entry in a database that the product team and you can track. I can’t wait to get this for Longhorn.

Also, Kent has announced the new Visual Studio 2005 Developer Center, complete with next-gen personalization features that we’re testing on this content before we push them out site-wide. My favorite part of the site is the bit where the product teams that contribute to .NET 2.0 point out what’s new (and the Windows Forms team even tell you how they’re progressing on the features they’re implementing).

Kent also points out the site for the new Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition, the beta of a slim and trim VS05 for students, hobbyists, etc. that you can download immediately. There’s even a contest for Express users where the prizes include an XBox and a copy of Halo 2.

Duncan also has a post where he addresses our current philosophy on coverage of shipping vs. future content on MSDN and why TechEd is going to throw it “out of whack” for a while (except me, of course, who’s going to be out of whack for a good long time : ).

NOTE: Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 will not install on Longhorn. Hopefully the next community drop of Longhorn will include a matching drop of VS05, but as of today, they remain incompatible.

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 today that can convert from SVG to XAML and show XAML on your existing .NET machines. Xamlon has been on a hiring spree, today bringing on Ben Cantlon. I don't know Ben, but he's asking for suggestions on what his company can do today to move you to XAML that works on .NET today and Longhorn tomorrow.

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…).

It's pretty cool for to see industry competitors, Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink, etc, to work together against a common foe: spammers. This gives me hope that warring nations will be able to band together when the alien invasion comes. : )

Apparently someone has an early copy of Visual Studio 2005 and has stumbled onto the big feature we've been saving for an important keynote.

I look at Krzysztof Cwalina’s post on delegated-based APIs in combination with generics and I think of the best parts of STL-like template-based programming without all the STL or templates causing the blinding pain just behind your eyes.

Earlier this week, BradA asked the community for feedback on the guys that work for him (it’s review season again at Microsoft). Adam had this to say in response:

“I’m waiting for the first blogger to suggest that we should let the development community choose when we go to the bathroom. Is there no internal process that doesn’t benefit from ‘community involvement’?”

When folks complain about too much community involvement, I judge we’re at just the right level. : )