I had no idea that there were so many declarative platforms for UI. The XUL Grand Coding Challenge 2004 shows off 10 and the XAML app ain't even posted yet (but it’s coming).

Dave Massy has amassed some information about the new WinHEC Longhorn build (4074) and it's available on the Longhorn Developer Center in the "Conference In A Box." The idea is to bundle the set of conference-related materials together into a kind of "virtual event" so that even folks that didn't get to go to WinHEC can get the Longhorn information that was provided there. The plan is to gather this same kind of material for future Longhorn community technology preview drops.

If you can't be at WinHEC to check out the latest Longhorn information, Paul Thurott's got you covered with his WinHEC 2004 Show Report and Photo Gallery.

Jim Allchin's WinHEC keynote was entitled, “Beyond Better, Stronger, Faster: Innovating around Experiences,” and in it, he talks about the experience that Longhorn is going to enable and how the technology supports that experience.

BillG’s keynote @ WinHEC this year was entitled “Seamless Computing: Hardware Advances for a New Generation of Software,” and is available in transcript form for your enjoyment.

In case you’ve heard the rumors about a new drop of Longhorn coming to WinHEC attendees, you’ve heard right. The Milestone 7.2 (M7.2) drop of Longhorn will be given to WinHEC attendees this week and will be available to MSDN Subscribers for download RSN*. The plan is to provide regular LH Milestone drops to the community as we have them, regardless of whether they really provide more functionality/stability or not. That way, we keep you guys in synch with what we’re doing and you can give us more relevant feedback.

In M7.2, the big deal is the addition of 3D support in Avalon, including declarative support in XAML. There are better things coming in 3D (as there are in the whole of Longhorn), but this is the initial set of functionality and we’d love to know what you think.

To set your expectations properly, WinHEC attendees and MSDN Subscribers will have access to the M7.2 OS and SDK bits, but will not have access to any matching Visual Studio bits. Neither the PDC Visual Studio installation nor the latest Visual Studio 2005 community drop nor even the upcoming Visual Studio 2005 beta will install or run properly on M7.2 Longhorn. We’re hoping for future LH Milestone drops to include the matching Visual Studio bits, but this one doesn’t. Luckily, MSBuild is included along with the compilers, so you can still build LH code under M7.2 like the pioneers did when they were blazing the Oregon Trail. It’ll put hair on your chest and build strong bones and teeth.

* RSN == Real Soon Now

The Windows Forms team has posted some sweet screenshots and overviews of the major new features in Windows Forms 2.0, including two I hadn’t heard about before:

• Client Configuration using type-safe per-user serialization of application settings
• Document Outline to show how controls are nested in a container

This is in additional to all of the other cool stuff, like a .NET WebBrowser wrapper, the new DataGridView, the strip controls, even more flexible layout, ClickOnce deployment (my personal favorite) and more.

[via Mike Weinhardt]

It has been hell keeping this to myself as Lutz has been sending me beta drops for the last coupla months for the completely reworked Reflector 4.0. Two very cool things about this release of Reflector:

1. It supports any version of the .NET Framework, so it works great on Longhorn and Whidbey
2. It has a replacement for the Class Viewer tools in the .NET SDK (wincv.exe) that I came to depend on in my writing and that hasn’t been updated for WinFX, so Reflector 4.0 is even more important to me than it would normally be

If you’re a .NET developer, you must use Reflector and if you use Reflector, you must use Reflector 4.0. Thanks, Lutz! We love you, man!

BTW, Lutz has set up a workspace for the Reflector 4.0 add-ins.

UPDATE: Denis Bauer has provided his own Reflector 4.0 Add-In to disassemble an entire assembly to a set of files. This is handy if, like me, you like to curl up with a good chuck of source code, put your feet up and enjoy a good cigar.