As Don pointed out, I missed one of the new companies spawned by DevelopMentor alum: Barracuda.NET, a training company founded by two of the friendliest and funniest instructors you will ever meet (and to whom the Visual Basic community needs no introduction): Ted Pattison and Jason Masterman. Right now these two are specializing in SharePoint training, including remote training (I want to know how they do that!), but I expect them to branch out into all kinds of interesting stuff.
Steven Edwards is an OSS guy working with the Wine guys to build a new version of Windows from scratch called ReactOS. They’ve got 20-30 people, they’ve been working on it for a few years and they’re 6-8 months away from getting client-side of networking to work to the point that it supports HTTP.
Oh my god.
Why would anyone want to waste time doing this? I don’t even like to build my own autocomplete listbox when it’s already been done and that’s only about 12 lines of .NET code! Why the hell would anyone want to build Win32 all over again, let alone Win16 (what the Wine guys do)?!? We have all these programmers with all this free time and all they can think to do is to clone OSes and applications that have already been built? Why not add something new into the world?
As another company started by a DevelopMentor alumnus, Wangdera is the union of two consultants so perfect together, they actually got married (I believe it was a marriage arranged by their respective clients, but they’ve come to love each other : ).
And while we're on companies formed by ex-DevelopMentorites, check out Relevance, LLC, a software contracting and content creation firm founded by Stuart Halloway and Justin Geghtland, the former DevelopMentor CTO and Head of IT, respectively. Justin was the co-author of the VB.NET version of Windows Forms book and Stuart did some very cool Gen<X> work, so I'm big fans of both of them. Relevance has been around for a while and are already doing all kinds of interesting projects, but if you can get them for your interesting project, you won't be sorry.
For of my most respected colleagues, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, Aaron Skonnard and Mike Woodring, have split off from DevelopMentor to form PluralSight, a training and content creation company. Between the four of them, they've authored more than 10 books and 175 technical articles and have more than 50 years of collective experience in all many of technical pursuits in the Windows development community. Good luck, guys!
As Wesner notes, the Longhorn SDK lists 3 distinct Avalon applications types: Windows/Forms apps, multi-page apps and documents. The beauty of Avalon is that it brings so many together, apps/documents, multi-window apps/multi-page apps, text/images/video/audio, 2D/3D, etc. And to answer Wesner, Microsoft will provide editing tools for Avalon beyond Notepad (someday…).
