The Avalon experiments keep on happening. This time, check out Avalon Chess!

I’ve long held the belief that the big deal about Avalon is that it provided a platform for a whole new class of data visualization and manipulation software, stuff that most of us can’t even dream of right now. But Edward Tufte can dream of it and in one of his dreams, he invented Sparklines, a very nice way to integrate graphics directly into a sentence instead of relegating it to a whole other paragraph.

As evidence of the power of Avalon to enable the next-gen UI, Sean Gerety has provided an Avalon implementation of Sparklines. Excellent work, Sean.

Drew Marsh has a very nice write-up of the need and usage of dependency properties via attached properties in Avalon, endorsed (with some additional commentary) by Rob Relyea from the Avalon team.

Read Rod Paddock’s Adventures in Avalon as he installs and binds to a DataSet:

• Avalon Adventures Part 0 : The Setup
• Avalon Adventures Part 1 : Data Access
• Avalon Adventures Part 2 : Basic Data Binding
• Avalon Adventures Part 3: Lists With Style
• Avalon Adventures Part 4: An Event to Remember
• Avalon Adventures Part 5: The Conversion
• Avalon Adventures Summary: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Because Ian doesn’t have blog comments and because the Avalon Animation team doesn’t yet have a blog, Elizabeth Nelson (PM) and Matt Calkins (SDE) have asked that I post the following response to Ian’s recent Animating Custom Types in Avalon post:

“I’m happy to report that building custom animations to animate font size is not necessary. (Nevertheless, Ian Griffiths’s sample is a spiffy example of how to build custom animations!) For the time being, TextEffects provides just the font size animation tools he seeks. There’s even a TextEffects sample in the Avalon CTP Announcement that Arik, Karsten and Tim put together. The properties of interest for font size animations are ScaleX and ScaleY.

“This isn’t the end of the story on Font animations — we’re still working on hooking a few things up internally to make it easier to use animations. Regardless of what else we cook up for built-in Font animations, TextEffects will come in handy for animating individual characters in a string in a coordinated manner.

“As for the concern about rendering artifacts when enlarging text, the issue is definitely on our radar!

“Thanks for your enthusiasm for custom animations.”

but it wasn’t until Woodward and Bernstein shared it with the world that he did anything about it. Now that we’ve got an Avalon that works with Windows XP and Visual Studio, if there’s something about it that you don’t like, blog about it or post to the Avalon newsgroup. Cry out loud! Don’t keep it inside. Don’t learn how to hide your feelings…

P.S. I *know* that there are some folks that want the Avalon CTP bits that don’t have MSDN subscriptions. You have my most sincere apologies.

P.P.S. I don’t mean to call the Avalon guys crooks. Those guys work super hard to build the right thing and they’re dying for the feedback. That makes them *very* different than Nixon, who really didn’t want the feedback he got. : )

Ian Griffiths illustrates the core concepts in Avalon animation by implementing a custom font size animation class. Basically, "animation" in Avalon means "changing an object's value over a range in a given time," e.g. changing a font size from 10 to 72 in 4 seconds or an X coordinate from 10 to 100 in 2 seconds. Animation seemed so fancy to me until I broke it down in my head in this way.

Karsten says: "Check out http://www.therhogue.com/WinFX/ for some more Avalon 3D samples.  Robert Hogue is an amazing developer and these are definitely worth checking out."