Matt Powell has posted a quiz about MSDN based on the video tour Channel9 posted yesterday. These questions were kind of embarrassing:

“1. According to Chris, what does PAG stand for?

“2. What does PAG really stand for?

“Extra Credit: Of the 100 people that make up MSDN, how many of those people are part of PAG?”

I knew that the odds of me getting the PAG acronym right were small, but I think I got the *spirit* of it right… I haven’t been this sheepish since Sara, the Matriarch of MSDN, had to remind me that I was a Content *Strategist* not a Content *Specialist* after my first public posting. : )

In the 2nd installment of my series rebuilding Solitaire using Longhorn technologies, I dive into 2 of the 5 Avalon families, specifically controls and panels, and build something that is at least approaching how Sol is supposed to look.

If you're interested in what the deepest, darkest jungle of MSDN looks like, take a gander. I was only able to explore a few of our hallowed halls, but did manage to sit in Sara's chair and pretend to run the place. : )

This seems a nice change from the tedium of paying taxes to the man:

“Rick Rashid, a senior vice president at Microsoft, will be online to take questions about innovation at Microsoft and the company’s research and development efforts. … Join Rashid online on April 15 from 12 to 1 p.m. ET for a discussion on Microsoft and its current research plans, goals and challenges.”

It looks like you can submit your questions in advance and that this is the same place where the chat will happen, but it’s darn hard to tell.

Robert Scoble and I walked around MSDN last week with a camera and here’s the first snippet where I talk about my experiences building Solitaire for Longhorn. Watching it now, it seems to me that I need to chill a bit and maybe take a breath now and again. : )

Karsten continues his dig into the Fundamentals Pillar of Longhorn by describing the 3 main points of the new configuration settings infrastructure of Longhorn:

1. Configuration schema, which allows settings to be schematized based on XML
2. Configuration engine that has a suite of APIs for reading and writing configuration settings
3. Optimized configuration store that can be synched with legacy stores such as the registry, INI files, etc.

Karsten also points out a tool (wcmedit.exe) for browsing the configuration store and a sample (Longhorn SDK->Samples->WMI->WMI.Configuration Sample 1).

Personally, I’ve never been happy with the various configuration settings stories of any of the Windows OSes, so I’m happy to see this problem tackled again. And if this new way of handling application and user configuration settings doesn’t meet your needs, let us know!

I’ve been silent myself on the real status of WinFS simply because I didn’t know enough to really say (although I did ask some of my internal friends who knew more to speak out). One person I didn’t even think to ask was Jeremey Mazner, a Longhorn Technical Evangelist who spends quite a bit of time WinFS.

Jeremey’s bottom line: none of the cuts affect the message from the PDC or the slides or code samples that he uses to show off the benefits of WinFS. He goes on to provide supporting evidence from inside and to speculate on where the stories to the contrary came from in the press.

That doesn’t mean that WinFS or any of the other Longhorn features we showed off at the PDC won’t take cuts in the future as we drive for our ship date, but as of right now, Jeremey has detected any real cuts in WinFS.

Jim’s running another Portland Nerd Dinner.

Also, if you haven’t met Ward Cunningham, you’ll want to come by tonight as he’ll be there.