Only4Gurus.com has posted a presentation by Jeffrey P. Snover, a Monad Architect, entitled "Monad Shell — Task-Oriented Automation Framework," in which he covers the Monad mission, the overall architecture and key developer and admin concepts. I'm a huge Monad fan and so should you be.

Joe Beda, development lead on the Avalon team, talks about rich vs. reach and where Avalon fits into this picture.

DonXML has ported his SVG to XAML conversion tool to the WinHEC build of Longhorn and provides the source as well as the binary on his GotDotNet workspace.

Eventually, we’ll be awash in real tools that output XAML, but until then conversion tools are important so that real artists can use the tools with which they’re already familiar, output them into a vector format supported by that tool and then convert them to XAML for use in Longhorn apps.

Peter Stern strikes again, this time with fun XAML t-shirts, coffee mugs and laptop stickers. Ordered.

As I post this, 82 Microsoft employees classify themselves as blogging about Longhorn or Longhorn-related topics. I thought I knew them all, but there are some that were new to me.

Looking for the a job in Longhorn? CareerBuilder.com has 5 Longhorn jobs listed:

• Software Development Lead, Microsoft
• Program Manager, Microsoft
• Application Developer, Microsoft
• Bussers, Longhorn Steakhouse
• Trailer Technicians, Lancaster, TX

Those last two look tasty. : )

Peter Stern, one of MSDN’s most excellent user experience and graphic designers, has started up a web site, with a special section just for fun Longhorn-related stuff, including a complete deck of card faces in XAML and his drawings of yours truly from the Longhorn Developer Center in XAML format.

I’ve been corrupting Peter’s thinking toward Longhorn for a few months now and I’ve fabulously happy to have him as the other half of that magical ying/yang designer/developer relationship that Avalon fosters.

There’s a smart client app that I’ve found myself using more and more and loving it: robocopy. The UI for robocopy sucks, of course. It’s a command line app with a myriad of options that take experimentation to really figure out, but once it’s started, it works like a champ, providing progress on each file and, most importantly, retrying once it loses it’s network connection.

What this allows me to do is set up long copy operations bringing down the latest internal Longhorn builds (which are huge) over my uncertain VPN connection. When I hibernate my box, I don’t worry about Robocopy dropping bits or getting confused and when I lose my internet or VPN connection, it retires 1 *million* times before giving up, which gives me plenty of time to notice and reestablish the connection.

Slap a friendlier UI on Robocopy and you’ve got a wonderful smart client citizen that should be emulated.