Today Jonathan Hodgson has posted a very cool article ostensibly about implementing Squarified Treemaps in Avalon, but he goes much further than that. First, he shows us what his Avalon implementation of Treemaps look like, including providing the source and a Maslan-ese video showing off his creation for those folks that don’t have the Longhorn PDC bits.

Then, Jonathan goes compare standard grid and graph visualizations to Treemaps and to describe the intimate details of the Treemap algorithm.

Later he provides the code-by-code description of his Avalon implementation, showing off the flexibility of XAML and Avalon, but before he does that, he gives us his opinion of why Avalon, the new Longhorn User Experience (UX) and XAML are all important and how Windows Forms fits into this new world.

And as if that weren’t enough, Jonathan than goes on to describe other visualization ideas that he thinks (and I agree) should be considered in this new, more flexible world that Longhorn is going to provide. And at the end, he provides an extensive set of references for further reading on these subjects.

All in all, Jonathan provides a 9500+ word tour de force, spanning prose, pictures, opinion, working code and even video! If he’d have done the voice over, he’d have gotten the whole thing. I put my feet up and worked my way through two cups of Chai tea, three biscuits and several pieces of teriyaki turkey jerky on and off during the day while reading his piece and enjoyed the experience very much. Jonathan covers a great deal of the reasons that we’re going to have to see passed our old barriers in Longhorn and he does it well, mixing his own thoughts with references from around the web on these topics. If you only read one piece on Longhorn this month, read this one.

Karsten posts about some cool P2P samples he found in the updated WinHEC Longhorn SDK.

Kenny Lim has posted the source to his WinHEC-compliant Avalon NNTP Reader (screenshot here). It's stateless right now, but WinFS seems a natural for keeping this kind of state as soon as we're allowed to extend the WinFS type system. Thanks, Kenny!

Sam Druker, Development Team Lead on the WinFS team, has a series of videos on Channel9 talking about a variety of WinFS topics:

• Where do the attributes/metadata come from that WinFS exposes to the shell and to custom applications?
• How pictures could be tagged based on calendar appointments and picture timestamps.
• What kind of search experience will WinFS enable in Longhorn?
• How an existing application, like Outlook Express, could be updated to take advantage of WinFS.
• And most importantly: how developers should prepare today for WinFS tomorrow.

The right thing happens, imo, but I'm hardly unbiased. : )

After Business Week reported the death of WinFS, some folks have been justifiably worried that such a cool feature would, in fact, be missing when their copy of Longhorn showed up at their door. Today Toby Whitney, the Group Program Manager of the WinFS team, stepped in to report that WinFS was alive and well:

“WinFS is in good shape and hasn’t been cut from Longhorn.  We’re going to ship it :-).  What we need is your feedback on whether we’re building the right thing.  It’d be great if you went to MSDN and downloaded the newest bits.  They’re much more stable and represent a big evolution of what we’re doing.”

To provide the feedback that Toby is looking for, download Longhorn and the Longhorn SDK from the MSDN Subscriber Downloads section and post your feedback on the WinFS newsgroup, where Toby posted his response and the WinFS team is hangs out waiting for you.

The WinHEC build of Longhorn just seems so much more stable than the PDC build of Longhorn, that I find it a pleasure to use. If you’re an MSDN subscriber into Longhorn, I recommend it.

Nathan Dunlap takes us on a tour of his favorite new things in Avalon in the WinHEC build of Longhorn (4074), including a sneak peak an updated GelButton, his love affair with the  new Grid panel, his lust for real 3D and more. You gotta love that enthusiasm. : )