Chris Anderson just did a fabulous job describing what makes Avalon more extensible than existing popular UI frameworks. What Avalon allows is the ability to have a Button instance like so:

<Window>
  <Button>Hello</Button>
<Window>

And then, somewhere else, using Styles, setting the VisualTree of what a Button looks like to be whatever you like, e.g.

<Style>
  <Button />
  <Style.VisualTree>
    <FlowPanel>
      <!-- anything you like in here,
e.g. <Text>, <Video>, <Rectangle>, whatever -->
      <ContentPresenter />
    </FlowPanel>
  </Style.VisualTree>
</Style>

Two interesting things about this button style. The first is that you can make a Button look however you want it to look, without worrying whether the Avalon team had that in mind up front. Two, when you want to drop in the content inside the Button tag, e.g. “Hello”, you drop in the ContentPresentor and it knows how to display what was placed in the Button (again, which could be anything). Simple and flexible: two things that I’m finding to be true more and more about Avalon the further I dig.

If you’re using Longhorn 4074 and MSBuild is telling you this, ‘The target “GetOutputAssembly” does not exist in the project.’, then try these steps to solve the problem:

• Backup %windows%\microsoft.net\windows\v6.0.4030\WindowsCommon.Target because you’re about to modify it

• In WindowsCommon.Target, replace all GetOutputAssembly with BuildOutputGroup

• Save and Close WindowsCommon.Target

• Re-run MSBuild and enjoy

Joe Nalewabau, a Lead PM on the Visual C# team, admitted today that he was responsible for the VC# keyboard randomization process for Visual Studio 2005 and describes the thought process that he went through to get there. I admit that Joe makes a good case for changing the key bindings, but I hate the idea of learning a whole new set (especially since, because I’m a keyboard boy, I’ll be crippled until I learn the new bindings). If Joe would swear on a stack of user manuals that the key bindings would never, ever change again, I’d be happier about it. (Rocky: “Again? That trick never works!“ Bullwinkle: “This time fur shure!“)

Of course, what I think doesn’t matter (it stopped mattering when I signed that damned employment contract : ). It’s what you think that matters and you should feel free to let him know what you think about the new VC# 2005 key bindings.

“If you’re familiar with data binding in Windows Forms or ASP.NET, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. In this presentation, Chris Sells, Content Strategist for the MSDN Longhorn Developer Center Web site, will cover data binding in Avalon, the new UI stack in Longhorn, Microsoft’s next OS. Chris will cover the basics of data binding and then move into transformers, filters and styling. If you’re going to build UIs in Avalon, you’d be crazy not to use data binding to do it.”

Data Binding in Avalon
6/24/2004, 6:30pm
Portland Community College Auditorium, Room 104
1626 SE Water Avenue
Portland, OR

If you hit the Microsoft-Watch web site often enough (it's been on 3 of my last 4 visits), you'll see my smiling face as a giant banner ad. Hell, I don't even put my picture up on my own site (well, except this one...)! Maybe they've got too many hits on their web site and instead of taking it down without warning, they're using my picture to scare folks away. ; )

Some quotes from Anders on Channel9:

“On of the things that we are trying to think about deeply in C# 3.0 is this big gap that I still see between general purpose languages and databases… Anyone who’s building an enterprise app is using both worlds… There’s certainly a lot of progress we can make by truly marrying these worlds… It’s nothing but mismatch. We gotta do away with that.”

Now that we’ve removed memory management from my code and between InitializeComponent and XAML, we’ve removed the need to write UI layout code, the next big chunk that gums up the works is data integration code. To have Anders thinking about how to extend C# 3.0 to mitigate this problem has me all a tingle!

Chris Anderson, Architect on the Avalon team, shows the first XAML "Hello, World" code and then describes two big “aha” moments to which XAML programmers can look forward. I've been to both of the moments that Chris describes and have had one more he doesn't mention: data binding in Avalon changes everything about how I build my UI.

It seems to me that folks embrace ATOM mainly to get away from the guy that’s credited with inventing RSS:

“I’m not running for president, I am not a corporate executive, and I don’t tell bedtime stories to adults unless its for fun and they’re friends. I can tell you what it feels like to be me, but I don’t know how it feels to be you. I’m willing to listen, up to a point, but unless your site is hosted on weblogs.com, I don’t understand why you’re hogging the microphone right now. I believe so strongly in the weblog world, that we should be grounded in truth. I think a lot of people participating in this dicussion are not grounded in truth, deliberately so, openly so. Shame on you, I say.”

This was said after he pulled down 3000 web sites he was hosting with no notice. ATOM is starting to sound more and more attractive…

Because this post has cauesd Mr. Winer to start swearing at me, I thought I’d remind folks of the following:

DISCLAIMER: This is a personal post of Chris Sells as an individual on my own personal web site and does not reflect the views or Microsoft as a whole or any portion of Microsoft.