Not only does Kenny show a cool little XAML animation sample, he does it in my favorite writing style.

I’ve always loved writers that start with something I’m familiar, in this case, a star defined in a hunk of XAML, and then build it up to add new features, in this case color, opacity, scale and rotation animations. The reason I love this style is that if I’m at a computer, I can follow along, folding the new features into my code and learning how things work by doing it. Or, if I’m reading the piece in the bathtub (which happens surprisingly often), I can build the code in my head (at least, ’til I get one of those cool waterproof military laptops).

Kenny’s piece almost does that, but the initial showing of the <TransformCollection> is shown without context, so it’s hard to know where it goes in the growing piece of XAML I was working on. Still, he follows it up a few sentences later with the entire XAML sample, so I can see the context. If he’d have been a little more explicit about the details of the animations he was applying and had wrapped it up with a summary, it would’ve been nearly perfect.

Oh, and animations in Avalon are cool, too. : )

Adam Kinney's at it again, this time with a sample of changing an Avalon object’s animation properties dynamically to develop an interactive game-like effect. Very cool.

“A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”
Unknown (to me : )

In this installment of the Longhorn Foghorn, I start my Longhorn implementation of the venerable Windows Solitaire. There is no interesting code yet, but I have explored some of the same decisions any developer will face when starting their first Longhorn application from scratch. Enjoy.

Ryan's at it again, this time with a custom Avalon control that adds spell-checking to the built in TextBox control.

You know that dialog that comes up when an app crashes and asks you if you'd like to send the error report to MS? You probably know that MS uses this information extensively to track down issues with their own software. You probably don't know that as an ISV, you can sign up to retrieve this data for your own apps, provide custom error messages and/or resolutions to your customers that report these errors and even write code to put customized information into these errors. And, to the best of my knowledge, it don't cost nuthin'.

Robert Scoble, Longhorn Evangelist at Microsoft, is interviewed on Microsoft’ search engine plans, including those provided in Longhorn by WinFS. Take this with a grain of salt like all advance info on Longhorn, but interesting nonetheless.

A month or so back, Carl and I were hanging out and it occured to me that while Carl had been interviewing famous folks all over the place on his .NET Rocks Show, he hadn’t been interviewed himself. So, Rory and I turned the tables on him. What results in Carl rambling on in pure bliss for almost two hours. Enjoy. : )

Ian and I are writing an Avalon book for O’Reilly and Associates together, but he’s way out in front of me, writing cool stuff like how to get rubber band selection outlines in Avalon. He also starts with a wonderful history of the XOR technique we used to use in Windows and why we no longer need it. In fact, we don’t even need XOR in Windows Forms and GDI+ today, although lots of folks don’t know that.

The key trick in Ian’s implementation is putting a hidden <Rectangle> element into your XAML document so that when it’s time to do the rubber hand outline, you can show it, move it and resize it based on where the mouse is, hiding the Rectangle again when the mouse button is released. This lets Avalon take care of the drawing, making this technique a thing of beauty.