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.

According to Computerworld, Don Norman, the design engineer famous for such works as “The Design of Everyday Things,” is consulting on Longhorn UI design. Cool! I especially love this statement:

“This is not the ‘computer age’ any more; this is the age of very smart chips hooked into a huge worldwide network. Infrastructure is about sharing.” This means two or more incompatible ways of doing things is counterproductive.

I love his characterization of client computers as “smart chips,” i.e. storing services and data production on the server, although the “smarts” of the client is important, too, i.e. data visualization and manipulation (which is death with a round-trip per click).

In Ian Griffith’s latest post, he shows 3 identical (to my eye) upper case Os next to each other and says, “[t]his clearly shows the shortcomings of that implementation” like a normal human can tell the difference!

The funny thing is, I’ve actually noticed that ClearType on Longhorn was generally better, although I never knew if that was my imagination or not. The thing I love about Ian is that he takes that vague sense of “this seems better” to “let me show you why it’s better and I’ll show you my own implementation of ClearType as a comparison just for fun.” What’s not to love? : )

After weeks of trying research, floating his thoughts on his blog and taking feedback from the blogging community (including several Microsoft folks), Jon Udell has posted an Infoworld article digging into the pillars of Longhorn (Avalon, Indigo and WinFS) and grading them on their implications. He summarizes nicely, I think:

“Indigo, by virtue of its developer-friendly simplification of Web services protocols, could propel Microsoft into the forefront of enterprise middleware. Although Longhorn’s use of Indigo will focus on networks of Windows peers, the technology isn’t bound to Longhorn. Expect to see Indigo-powered ‘enterprise service bus’ offerings from Microsoft and partners.”

“If WinFS succeeds in delivering improvements in users’ ability to organize and manage local information, enterprises looking to drive productivity up — and support costs down — will want it. The wild card will be the level of support for legacy document formats and emerging XML formats. Benefits that accrue only to new WinFS-aware applications won’t tip the scale.”

“Avalon’s TV-like ‘presentation experiences’ clearly favor the home entertainment center over the business desktop. An accelerated convergence of voice, video, and data could alter that equation, and Avalon is designed to help drive that convergence. But enterprises concerned about reach and lock-in will need to carefully evaluate the trade-offs.”

I think that Jon’s nails the tensions involved in Indigo and WinFS, but misses the boat on Avalon, which represents a much-needed overhaul of our aging presentation sub-system and enables a host of applications that we need to visualize and manipulate the ever increasing amount of data with which we deal. Of course, the existing presentation stack will continue to work just fine, but for those applications that need it, Avalon will be a god send. As we progress over the next decade, more and more apps are going to need what Avalon provides.

However, while I don’t agree with every that Jon says, but I do appreciate the thoroughness that went into his opinions. Folks involved in Longhorn, both inside and outside of Microsoft, should take a look.