As Wesner notes, the Longhorn SDK lists 3 distinct Avalon applications types: Windows/Forms apps, multi-page apps and documents. The beauty of Avalon is that it brings so many together, apps/documents, multi-window apps/multi-page apps, text/images/video/audio, 2D/3D, etc. And to answer Wesner, Microsoft will provide editing tools for Avalon beyond Notepad (someday…).
Greg Schecter, one of the designers of the new support for 3D in Avalon available in the Longhorn WinHEC build, provides a nice overview and some other links to Avalon 3D resources:
3D support in Avalon is not meant to build Doom 3, but it does shine especially brightly in two places: 1) you can do 3D in a declarative way in XAML, just like the rest of Avalon and 2) as Greg describes, the integration of 2D and 3D in Avalon is nice and clean the way it isn’t in most current 3D APIs. I’m looking forward to taking advantage of the 3D support in my own apps, which isn’t something I ever considered before with DirectX. Thanks, guys!
Carl IM'd me to see if I could call into a long conference call. I said that I would, but couldn't 'til the brothers Sells had gone to bed (doing the dad thing, don't you know). Anyway, I called and got to swap conference stories with Carl, Rory, Dan, Bill, Mark, Kathleen and Robert. Then they told me I was actually broadcasting on an episode of .NET Rocks live focusing on conferences and today I got the URL. Ooops. Hope I didn't say anything I shouldn't have... : )
Kam Vedbrat, a member of the Longhorn User Experience team (aka the Aero team) talks about the warm, fuzzy tasks that they went through to come up with "what innovative" looks like in ways that I admire, 'cuz I never would have thunk of them.
