I've been completely unconnected for four days, so I'm sure that Joel’s essay on the differences in culture between Unix and Windows programmers has been blogged to death, like most of Joel's essays. However, I was a Unix programmer for 4 years before becoming a Windows programmer, so this one really spoke to me. I especially like his description of how programs act under Unix so that they can communicate with other programs (success produces no output) vs. how they act under Windows so that they can communicate with people (success produces output). I don't know what I'm going to do with these new insights, but I'm enjoying them nevertheless.

Brad Abrams describes how the Whidbey .NET Framework adds support for tracking unmanaged memory and limited resources of a non-memory nature. The former is handled by informing the GC of added "pressure" associated with unmanaged memory and the latter by exposing the private HandleCollector class that .NET 1.x has used for a while now. It's not reference counting, but it'll do for a start... : )

Apparently it’s Longhorn day for MS videos:

“Quentin Clark provides an overview of WinFS, including what benefits it produces, what it is, and how it’s put together. This episode introduces WinFS as a basis for more detailed presentations.”

"In this episode of the .NET Show we focus on how 'Longhorn' was presented, and received, at the PDC. In our first segment we talk with key players in the Longhorn project, Brad Abrams, Chris Anderson, Quentin Clark, and Pablo Fernicola about the main messages that they are hoping developers at the PDC understand about Longhorn. We then switch the tables and talk with Richard Hale Shaw, Simon Stewart, and Robb McLarty, a diverse set of attendees of the PDC and hear straight from them what they think about Longhorn, and how it might affect their development efforts moving forward."

And than Nathan posts another sample showing off the various kinds of resources to be defined in Avalon and how to define them on top of one another. I’m loving this guy!

BTW, this is post 1000 on this feed. I can’t keep  up with Scoble, of course, but I had no idea I was *that* wordy. : )

Nathan Dunlap kicks off his new Avalon design blog with a sample on how to clip video to arbitrary shapes. I don't know for what I'd use this, but it's nice to know it's there. : )

And from heaven, the thing that budding Longhorn programmers most need falls to earth. Nathan Dunlap, a designer on the Avalon team, has taken up blogging. He's covering design tips as someone that understands Avalon *and* design inside and out. Welcome, Nathan! Subscribed.

If you haven’t seen it, Xamlon is a .NET 1.1 implementation of Longhorn’s XAML. And while I was under the impression that it was just XAML, i.e. a language for declaring and defining objects, it looks like Xamlon is an attempt to implement Avalon, too. I haven’t downloaded it, but looking at the Xamlon samples and code online, it looks like a subset of Avalon. Interesting…