Joe has a particularly dim view of where we’ve come with GUIs in the last 10 years. In fact, it’s much more dim than my own view. On the other hand, I think he nails one point:

“There is a core set of patterns that are repeated over and over in thousands of applications, each of which has their own subtly different behavior and visuals. Back and forward, undo and redo, delete, find, bookmark, etc… And there are a core set of graphical objects like images, text, maps, and calendars, which everybody has to reinvent every time they need one in their application, and they usually do a lousy job of reinventing it. Sure, there are classes for some of these things in GUI libraries, but the user doesn’t see that - they see the programmer’s personal interpretation of how they think it should look and work.”

As a app builder in my heart, I absolutely want the tools to build *good* applications, not just *pretty* applications.

Holy cow! Windows Forms Programming in C# is #10 on the list of best-selling Microsoft-related books. I'd like to thank the academy...

From the same folks that brought you dotnet247.com comes winfx247.com. Since half of my .NET coding research yields answers at dotnet247.com, I'm excited to see the Longhorn/WinFX equivalent. It's new, but I'm sure it will be a very useful site over time.

Sat 1/10/2004 10:12 am

Jamie, a contender for a Master Builder spot at Lego, describes a very different interview process than you’re likely to get at Microsoft (except that ’softies hit you with sneaky stuff, too, sometimes : ).

Tom’s Hardware is hosting a video of a guy moving heaven, earth and liquid nitrogen to get his PC over 5GHz. I don’t know the right term, but the arrangement of the shots and the music made me laugh all the way through. And the ending is worth sticking around for. : )

BTW, I’m sure I overhyped this so you won’t enjoy it like I did, but that’s OK; I’m posting this with a smile. : )

ClickOnce is the install-on-demand technology for Longhorn, but makes it's debut in the next version of the .NET Framework, codename "Whidbey." Hear Jamie Cool from the Windows Forms team introduce the technology he first built in prototype form as the AppUpdater Component.

Don't have enough bloggers to listen to? Can't find your favorite MS blogger? Chances are that you'll find a bunch of interesting tidbits at the new MSDN blogger site.

Developers shrug off Longhorn delay rumors. <whew> : )