“The Longhorn speech API offers baked-in functionality for voice commands inside the operating system (OS). This is a giant leap forward in the functionality provided by an OS. With the addition of an alternate user interface, products in the future may have a much different mode of interaction than currently used. Through the course of this article, the basics of voice input and output will be shown, as well as the construction of grammar, and how to act on recognition.”

[via Paul Lamere]

Rob Chandler, a Microsoft Help MVP, has posted a look at where he sees User Assistance heading in Longhorn, both in the UI and in the new help system. I see Longhorn as an opportunity to crank user experience up a notch in every way and user assistance is an important part of that.

I’m a big cmd.exe user and was a big Korn Shell user before that, so command shells are an important part of my life and thus, I’m skeptical of new ones. However, I’ve been drooling over MSH (the Microsoft Shell — codename Monad) ever since I first saw it. In fact, when I saw Karsten’s post on getting the Monad bits for Windows XP and 2003, I was much excited. Then, I saw the Fundamentals Pillar topic on The .NET Show, which featured Jeffrey Snover (The Father of Monad) in the back half of the show and I was hooked. The way he told the Monad story motivated me to register for the public beta of Monad via Karsten’s instructions and wait impatiently over the weekend to be awarded permissions to download the bits.

Which I promptly installed on the WinHEC build of Longhorn (build 4074), even though it’s only supported for Windows XP and Windows 2003.

As it turns out, Longhorn comes with an earlier preview of Monad, but it’s much older than the latest Monad drop. So, I installed the latest Monad on the latest Longhorn, hoping that it would work and that I could follow along with my new hero Jeffrey.

And follow along I did, because not only did the latest Monad bits install and run just peachy under Longhorn, but the included Getting Started docs gave me hours of fun! With the functionality that Monad provides, I’m going to have a hard time going back to anything else.

If you’re a command-line person, I recommend getting on the Monad beta, taking it for a spin and letting those guys if there’s anything you don’t like (for example, I miss the “start” command, but I think I’ll go build it…).

There are two companies vying to be your XAML vendor today to help you get read for Longhorn tomorrow. Mobiform released an updated XAML viewer today that can convert from SVG to XAML and show XAML on your existing .NET machines. Xamlon has been on a hiring spree, today bringing on Ben Cantlon. I don't know Ben, but he's asking for suggestions on what his company can do today to move you to XAML that works on .NET today and Longhorn tomorrow.

The benefit of 3D support in Avalon is not the 3D support itself (we’ve had various ways to do 3D stuff in Windows apps for a while now, including both OpenGL and DirectX). The benefit is the tight integration we get between 3D and 2D elements in Avalon (and we’ll get even closer integration as we move closer to the Longhorn release).

For example, in his Avalon 3D Hit Testing Demo, Daniel Lehenbauer shows how hit testing can move into a ViewPort3D element (the representation of a 3D scene in an Avalon display) into the specific element being clicked. In other words, you can have a Button right next to a ViewPort3D showing a teapot and your app can easily tell which one was clicked. Handling a teapot click is slightly harder than handling a Button click simple because the Button does it’s own hit testing, but the Avalon 3D hit testing supports advanced features like clicking through the handle of the teapot w/o that being classified as a “hit,” all of which Daniel explains nicely in his sample.

I know this is almost a year old, but the permutations algorithm was my favorite from STL and I’ve had occassion to miss it since moving to .NET, so it was nice to find Dr. James McCaffrey’s Using Permutations in .NET for Improved Systems Security on msdn.com. The security implications are interesting, I suppose, but permutations are useful than that (like if you’re trying to crush librarians…).

Over the last few weeks, I’ve fallen in love with the power and simplicity of Avalon data binding. In this month’s column, I start a 2 article series by focusing on the basics of data binding in Avalon and tease you with a screen shot of my Longhorn Solitaire application rebuilt using data binding and styles, the details of which I’ll cover in the 2nd part of the series.

Richard Turner, a PM on the Indigo team, has some advice about how to build web services while we wait for Indigo. He didn't mention WSE2 specifically, but I assume he means for you to use it when you hit the wall on ASMX for web services implementations, e.g. when you need WS-Security support.