After spending a bunch of time with various partial IBindingList implementations, I just stumbled onto a brand new one in the Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview: BindingList<T>. It’s not done yet, e.g. sorting doesn’t work, but the model is certainly what you’d want, e.g. you create a BindingList<Person>, bind it to something smart, like a DataGrid or a DataGridView, and you’re able to edit instances of your custom type or add or remove instances, as well as search or sort instances, just like you’d need a custom implementation of IBindingList for today. Very nice.

Newsgroups, mailing lists, web forums and blogs (with comments) are all very similar. Fundamentally, they’ll all about posts and replies. Sometimes the posts are replicated to servers around the world, acccepting replies in the same way. Sometimes the posts are replicated to a set of subscribers via SMTP and replies come in via POP3. Sometimes the posts are part of a web page and provided via HTTP, using HTML forms to take replies. Sometimes the posts are served up via a centralized server using HTTP + RSS or HTML, accepting responses via HTML forms or the CommentAPI. Fundamentally, it’s all the same thing, though: posts and replies. Why do I have to suffer with the limitations of any one of these protocols just to hang out with my friends to talk shop?

I don’t like newsgroups because I don’t like having a separate reader outside of my mail reader (and NewsGator ain’t anywhere close to what I want yet). Plus, newsgroups are very susceptible to spam, although the MS newsgroups are carefully patrolled to kill it before it spreads.

I don’t like web forums because I either have to poll the site (which RSS has cured me of) or the integration of the forum into my mail reader is limited to notification only. Plus, every single web forum has a vastly different UI and set of features and the inconsistencies bug me. On the other hand, web forums are pushing the envelope on features that I really want, like author and content ratings. I love mailing lists, but don’t want to duplicate any of the WinFX newsgroups in mailing lists just yet to avoid fracturing the budding developer community.

Blogs are wonderful, of course, and RSS is the only thing that’s worth me spinning up a whole separate reader than my mail reader, but it’s impossible to follow a thread of conversation between blogs or comments on other people’s blogs. On the other hand, the server-per-poster model is great because I can just subscribe to the posters that I like, increasing the signal to noise ratio substantially.

I think we should pack all of the features of mailing lists, newsgroups, web forums and blogs into a single backend and expose it via HTTP, NNTP, SMTP/POP3 and RSS as appropriate. Is it time for a new protocol that can be dumbed down to the existing protocols for the diehards that won’t give up their readers of choice? Personally, I’d like to get everything via SMTP/POP3 except for my RSS feeds (although I don’t know why — maybe it’s just that I can’t seem to get a handle on a keyboard-only mode for RSS reading in NewsGator the way I can in SharpReader…).

I find that in the process of learning about something, I often dig through a lot of places before I come up with what I’m looking for.

In the case of Visual Studio 2005 Team System (aka “Burton”), I wanted to know a lot more about the features that MS was building into VS for teams, including much more flexible source code control integration, web site functionality and stress testing, static code analysis like FxCop and perf. analysis built right into the build system and stats recording as part of the normal workflow for project management reporting.

In the process of gathering these details, here are the places I went:

• Official Visual Studio 2005 Team System home page
• VSTS screenshots from the MS Developer Tools Roadmap
• VSTS demonstration videos
• VSTS FAQ, including the ever favorite “Where do I get it?”
• Korby Parnell’s announcement as a member of the VSTS team
• Official Visual ActiveKent Sharkey .NET SE 3.11 VSTS Announcement

Here are some things that tickled my fancy:

• Data binding to drive web site testing. I want the same thing for stand-along client testing
• The real-time stats and drill-down for ongoing web site stress testing
• Building static code analysis right into the build process so that I can fix those issues along with my compiler issues
• The idea of collecting project stats as part of what the developer is doing in VS and using those to roll-up conprehensive stats for the whole team
• Seeing our own internal tools, like PREfast, made available to our customers and integrated so nicely into VS

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Greg Schecter, one of the designers of the new support for 3D in Avalon available in the Longhorn WinHEC build, provides a nice overview and some other links to Avalon 3D resources:

• Greg Schechter’s Introducing 3D in Avalon and 2D/3D Integration
• Basic 3D in the Longhorn SDK
• Joe Beda’s WinHEC report, including a screenshot of an Avalon 3D sample

3D support in Avalon is not meant to build Doom 3, but it does shine especially brightly in two places: 1) you can do 3D in a declarative way in XAML, just like the rest of Avalon and 2) as Greg describes, the integration of 2D and 3D in Avalon is nice and clean the way it isn’t in most current 3D APIs. I’m looking forward to taking advantage of the 3D support in my own apps, which isn’t something I ever considered before with DirectX. Thanks, guys!

I got an email asking to serve as a reference for a guy I'd never heard of today. Just so you know, especially in a down economy, employers check references. Also, it's a good idea to ask a reference between adding them to your resume so they don't have to respond, "Roy? I don't know anyone named Roy..." : )

The Avalon team has posted their WinHEC slides:

Greg Schecter: Avalon Graphics Stack Overview [682 KB]

Joe Beda: Avalon Graphics - 2D, 3D, Imaging and Composition [284 KB]

Kerry Hammil: Graphics on the Windows Desktop [496 KB]

David Brown: Avalon Text [1.05 MB]

[via Adam Kinney]

Ian blathers on about the power for vector graphics for a while then hits you with this link demonstrating the power of vector graphics. Wow. Some of those pictures are amazing.