According to legend, half the Windows XP BSODs are 3rd party driver crashes, reducing our “trustworthiness” to the user (trust is more than security and privacy). Yesterday, DevSource reported on a new driver model in Longhorn that will isolate the OS from driver crashes and simplify the development platform to reduce crashes in the first place. Amen, brother.

[via Dactylmatrix]

Daniel Lehenbauer, an SDE on the Avalon team, has a nice explanation of the 3D coordinate space in Avalon with some very illustrative pictures. I’ve got absolutely no experience with 3D and I can follow what he’s talking about. Looks like Daniel should be writing a book…

Tim Sneath, a .NET Architect in MS-UK, lays out the audiences and tensions of MSBuild very nicely in this short summary. If you want more information, there are a bunch of MSBuild resources on the Longhorn Developer Center’s Tools & Code Samples page.

Does anyone have a VPC image of Longhorn 4074 (the WinHEC Build) that they could share with me? Every time I try to install, it crashes the VPC. Normally, I wouldn't ask (I have a machine just for Longhorn), but I have the need to run the latest public and the latest internal builds. Thanks!

Facetop has been all over the web for a couple of days and I’d like to point out two things about it:

1. This is exactly the kind of thing we’re enabling with the advanced client capabilities in Longhorn that you just couldn’t do in a web app. Until you see something like this, you don’t think of it, but when you’ve got advanced capability in the platform, all kinds of cool stuff happens that the creator of the platform (Apple’s Mac OS X, in this case) never considered. I fully expect the coolest Longhorn apps to come from someone outside of Microsoft.
2. I want it!

Suddenly, after having been worthless/dormant since its inception, the Feedster Windows Longhorn Buzz Feed has begun spouting useful information. Subscribed.

Richard Turner, a PM on the Indigo team, answers some of the Indigo questions that came up as a result of his recent Channel9 interview, including:

• Will .NET Remoting go away any time soon? (no)
• Will Indigo Services require IIS? (no)
• We need to support Windows 2000 and XP. Can Indigo Services be hosted on these OSs? (it’s not supported) Will applications running on these OSs be able to act as clients to Indigo Services? (absolutely)
• We expose some of our remoting assemblies via HTTP and host at least one in IIS.  Will Indigo Services offer interoperability with these configurations? (yes) Will we be able to write an Indigo wrapper around a remoting DLL? (yes)

I’ve just realized that Richard has turned into my most favorite Indigo blogger. He straddles the fence nicely between what is available today and what’s going to be available tomorrow. Thanks, Richard. We need you. : )

Ashvil DCosta, a software professional in Bangalore writing a book on outsourcing software product development, posts his ideas about how Longhorn, particularly WinFS, will change the way we think about and develop applications.