Some quotes from Anders on Channel9:

“On of the things that we are trying to think about deeply in C# 3.0 is this big gap that I still see between general purpose languages and databases… Anyone who’s building an enterprise app is using both worlds… There’s certainly a lot of progress we can make by truly marrying these worlds… It’s nothing but mismatch. We gotta do away with that.”

Now that we’ve removed memory management from my code and between InitializeComponent and XAML, we’ve removed the need to write UI layout code, the next big chunk that gums up the works is data integration code. To have Anders thinking about how to extend C# 3.0 to mitigate this problem has me all a tingle!

Chris Anderson, Architect on the Avalon team, shows the first XAML "Hello, World" code and then describes two big “aha” moments to which XAML programmers can look forward. I've been to both of the moments that Chris describes and have had one more he doesn't mention: data binding in Avalon changes everything about how I build my UI.

Wesner Moise reports on a talk that Jeff Richter did on the .NET versioning story in the Longhorn time frame. Some interesting quotes:

• “a library could not easily be updated since the CLR looked for an exact version match. There was a complex way to solve this problem through policy files; however, even engineers at Microsoft found this approach too difficult.”
• “Microsoft has a new approach for Longhorn and Orcas (.NET v3.0), which divides assemblies into two categories, Platforms and Libraries.”
• “Most assemblies will or should be libraries. Microsoft discourages the use of platform assemblies.”
• “There are actually three types of platform assemblies: System-wide, process-wide, and app domain-wide.”
• “Longhorn will no longer support multiple CLRs. Every managed application will be forced to use the latest version of the CLR on the system.”
• “Whidbey is expected to include an Assembly attribute, AssemblyFlagsAttribute, which allows to developer to specify Library, AppDomainPlatform, ProcessPlatform, SystemPlatform, or Legacy to identify the versioning scheme the CLR uses to load a reference assembly.”

I know that the existing versioning story doesn’t cut it for a lot of folks. Will this new model solve the problems? Is there a complexity danger?

Also, Ian has some thoughts on the new model.

Rich Turned, an Indigo PM, has some useful things to say about Indigo in his recent Channel9 videos:

• What is the biggest misperception of Indigo?
• What is your advice to developers who are thinking about Indigo and interoperability?
• What would be the first thing about Indigo that you’d show a Visual Basic programmer?

Plus, Rich has a blog to which I subscribe (but I wish he were more prolific).

I’m really loving Jon’s approach to exploring and questioning the goals and implications of Longhorn:

1. Questions about Longhorn, part 1: WinFS
2. Questions about Longhorn, part 2: WinFS and semantics
3. Questions about Longhorn, part 3: Avalon’s enterprise mission

I don’t have any pithy summaries of his basic points; his posts deserve a read and a think.

This post is an oldie, but a goody, in which Kenny Lim talks not only about custom Avalon controls catching property changes so that they can re-render themselves, but also about the custom measurement sequence, which is a core piece of a control that does custom layout like, say, a pile of cards (hypothetically, of course : ).

VisitorVille maps your real-time web site data to a SimCity-like environment that you can use to see where folks are going on your site and how they’re navigating from one place to another. It does the other web traffic kinds of analysis, too, but the ability to watch your visitors in real-time looks pretty darn cool. This is the kind of thing that Longhorn should be good at enabling.

[via Jason Whittingon]

Richard Turner, a PM on the Indigo team, addresses the biggest misperception about Indigo in this Channel9 video.

Bottom line: Microsoft is not taking MSMQ, COM+ or Remoting out of the platform; it’s just that Indigo, which subsumes the features of these other technologies, will do it all better.