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.
