Kevin Lindsey has been exploring Avalon and posting some things he didn’t expect. I love how he posts pictures of what he expected alongside of what he actually got:

• Possible Avalon SpreadMethod Bug
• Possible Avalon LinearGradient Bug
• Avalon Missing Pen Functionality
• Possible Avalon Rectangle Stroke Bug

Keep it up, Kevin!

Ryan has posted a nice, consise write-up of getting started writing help in Longhorn.

That is all.

Apparently Robert had a conversation with a customer that was holding up .NET adoption because Longhorn was coming with Avalon. If you’re already planning on building Longhorn-only applications, more power to you, but most folks will need to write apps that run on other versions of Windows for some time to come. For those folks, we have .NET and Windows Forms today and for at least another decade. Let’s do the math:

• According to recent industry rumor, Longhorn won’t ship ’til 2006.
• According to our internal OS folks, a new OS isn’t ubiquitous enough to target it as a base for new consumer application work for 6 years.
• Even 2 years after .NET was available everywhere, people are still actively doing the MFC and VB6 thing.
• 2 years ’til 2006 + 6 years ’til ubiquity + 2 years not doing the new thing = 10 years of good, strong life left in Windows Forms at least.

In spite of my love on Avalon, I’m so confidendent that Windows Forms has a life left that I’m working with Mike on Windows Forms Programming 2/e. A book is hard enough that you don’t do it if the topic is dead, so that’s me putting my time (and Addison-Wesley’s money) where my mouth is.

With the bottom line more and more important, the era of “company loyalty” and “guaranteed employment” is long over. RentACoder.com takes this to it’s logical conclusion, matching vendors with jobs and money with qualified folks with the time and willingness to do the job at the asking price. As connectedness improves, the importance of being on site declines, the perfect market for services will develop, giving us eBay for employment.

Robert Hess, that .NET Show guy, talks about why he’s so into Longhorn in the recent .NET Shows lately:

“What you -do- need to pay attention to, is how ‘Longhorn’ will evolve the users concept of exactly what a Windows application is all about, and what features and functionality it should be providing them with. Many application developers should be starting to think about this TODAY, and how to begin incorporating some of these features into their application moving forward. Just the schematized file system that WinFS will introduce alone can represent not only a big jump in the potential functionality of an application, but also a considerable change in how your existing application might want to begin thinking about data storage.”

I honestly never thought I'd see this day. Now I have to come up with other fun news of which to make fun in my talks (maybe the 0.0000007% change in Avagadro’s number over the last 5 years?).

If you were listening to the .NET Rocks show today, you heard me invent something that Microsoft has already shipped: The Microsoft SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer. <whew> One less thing I have to build myself. : )