Rob Relyea, a Lead PM on the Avalon team, has posted the 7 goals that drives the XAML design decisions.

John Montgomery, Microsoft Marketing Maven in charge of .NET and WinFX messaging, has posted the road map agreed on by the Windows Forms and Avalon teams about which UI stack to use and when (an excerpt is presented here):

“Microsoft’s roadmap for client UI development has three main phases:

1. “Today, use Windows Forms v1.1 and observe the Microsoft Patterns and Practices guidance for maintaining clean separation between UI and other application logic.
2. “When Avalon v1.0 releases (scheduled for mid-2006), we recommend that applications looking to differentiate their user interface such as Web sites and graphically intensive applications such as complex data visualization look closely at Avalon. Other applications should continue using Windows Forms.
3. “Following the release of Avalon 1.0, the next version of Visual Studio following Visual Studio 2005 will contain tools and designers to support Avalon. At this point, customers should start to move their new development efforts to Avalon and use the Windows Forms/Avalon interoperability features.”

I really wish Ian would port his TopDraw sample to the Avalon CTP...

Ian gives into peer pressure (I love the Internet : ) and posts an update to his DirectX mesh (.x) files to XAML conversion tool that works with the Avalon CTP.

Now that we have an Avalon that works with WinXP and VS05, what’s holding you back?

Richard Childress has posted on his experiences with the Smart Client Offline Application Block as valuable for not only solving his domain-specific problem, but also in getting .NET to be used at all:

“Working in IT, where we try to only write code that helps run our business, it’s a Great Thing when you don’t have to write plumbing code. Writing a class here and another class there, while leveraging a big chunk of code that we didn’t write to solve a problem, is golden. This block, itself, is actually helping drive the case for starting to incorporate the framework into our app(s). The value is unquestionable.”

As cool as XamlPad and Bouncing Boing Ball are, I’ve had at least one blog comment from someone looking for a useful Avalon CTP application (something not targeted at developers, I’m guessing). Well look no more, because we have Pong! What more use can we expect from our computers than that?!? : )

So, I’ve never done anything with Python, so I’ve never really figured out what the big deal was. However, if the interactive Python development environment is anything like the experience of XamlPad, I’m glad I haven’t tried it, otherwise I’d never be able to go back.

Oh my god, that interactive model is wonderful! I sat down this afternoon to port my Longhorn Solitaire code to the Avalon CTP and had to completely re-write my GridPanel layout code to use the new Grid because the GridPanel is deprecated. However, I didn’t know a thing about the Grid, so found a great little Grid sample from the WinFX SDK and started the latest version of XamlPad and taught myself how to use the Grid interactively.

Every time I added an element or attribute, I saw the results in real-time. If I screwed up the syntax, I got a red error message in the status bar. I can’t tell you how much pleasure I got adding <ColumnDefinition> and <RowDefinition> elements and setting the Grid.Row and Grid.Column attributes on my cell elements, watching things move around the screen and figuring out Grid the content model. It was fabulous! All development should be like this…

It's amazing to me how much stuff they've packed into Visual C# Express. In this Channel9 demo from Dan Fernandez, I learned about a ton of VS05 features that I didn’t know about. I hope they all work from the non-Express product...