Devleap.com, a site dedicated to Windows development for Italian developers, has added a new Longhorn section. Even though I can't read Italian, I like the idea of Longhorn articles in a language of romance. Read them with your sweetheart over a candle lit dinner. I know that's my plan. : )

Just so folks know, I feel no responsibility whatsoever to keep my postings on sellsbrothers.com to a specific topic. If I want to post my political views, I’ll do so. If that bothers you, I suggest you unsubscribe now as complaints about the subject matter for my posts will fall on deaf ears.

Also, there’s an undoc’d feature on my site that might interest folks. I have topic-specific RSS feeds that correspond to the categories of topics that I post. For example, the Longhorn DevCenter Editor’s Blog is fed from http://sellsbrothers.com/news/rss2.aspx?category=longhorn so that only Longhorn-specific topics show up on that page. If you’d like to form your own topic-specific RSS feed URL, I currently use the following categories:

• Tools
• Longhorn
• Spout
• Conference
• Fun
• Writing
• Money

However, I post a lot of stuff that’s uncategorized and the only way to get that stuff is to subscribe to the main RSS feed.

Robert Wlodarczyk posts another sample dedicated to showing off the glowing image effects in Avalon. Sweet.

For those asking, I have sent off a selection of our questions to Don. Eating dinner with him last night, he said that the first three answers were “yes,” “no” and “100.” When he gets all the answers together, I’ll post them here. : )

Robert Wlodarczyk, a software engineer on the Avalon testing team, has posted a most excellent sample showing off the wide variety of effects you can apply to images in Avalon. Very cool.

In talking about recent developments at Microsoft, Mary Jo sums up my own feelings nicely:

“Windows is cool again, thanks to all the excitement around Longhorn.”

But I’m hardly unbiased. : )

Brad Abrams, Lead PM on the .NET Framework team, is asking how you’d like to see Microsoft improve the WinFX documentation. Don't be shy; complaining now can improve your life later.

It bugs me that Bush would steal JFK’s dream of getting off of our planet, especially after we’ve already done it. Why not reach for getting America off of foreign oil by developing alternative energy sources, freeing us from the need to screw around with other countries and making us targets for terrorism? That’s a cool dream. But noooo, you can’t do that one, because you’re just a shill for US big oil!

Sorry about that… I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.