It's interesting to hear what the Mozilla and Gnome guys are thinking about to rally their forces to combat Longhorn. The interesting thing about it for me, a developer and user of software, is that when MS products improve, competitors feel the need to keep up and vice versa. In other words, I think competition is a big win for everyone and I, for one, am glad we have it.

If you don’t know him, Miguel is the architect of the Mono open source project whose aim is to implement the .NET CLR and the Framework Class Libraries on Linux (and other places) so that .NET apps can run on OSes other than Windows.

In this essay, Miguel comments on the importance of Longhorn:

″…the combination of Microsoft deployment power, XAML, Avalon and .NET is killer. …

“The combination means that Longhorn apps get the web-like deployment benefits: develop centrally, deploy centrally, and safely access any content with your browser.

“The sandboxed execution in .NET means that you can visit any web site and run local rich applications as oppposed to web applications without fearing about your data security: spyware, trojans and what have you.

“Avalon means also that these new ‘Web’ applications can visually integrate with your OS, that can use native dialogs can use the functionality in the OS (like the local contact picker).

“And building fat-clients is arguably easier than building good looking, integrated, secure web applications (notice: applications, not static web pages).”

What I find most interesting is that while Miguel doesn’t cover the entire Longhorn story, e.g. he doesn’t mention WinFS at all, what he does mention, he summaries well. I’m glad to see the message of what’s going to make Longhorn cool is getting out. : )

If you can't wait for Solitaire, he's a game you can play on Longhorn today, Deepak’s sample implementation of tic-tac-toe in C# and XAML. It also comes with a nice little write-up for your development edification and the source. Enjoy.

It's my belief that the big deal with Avalon is that it gives us much more powerful tools to deal with data visualization and manipulation. Towards that end, Ward turned me onto Edward Tufte at lunch today and I've got “Envisioning Information” on it's way to my house as we speak.

Roman Kiss has built a little Indigo logging tool that uses Indigo's ability to drop arbitrary code into the message pipline. Very handy for seeing what's really going on at the message level w/o changing any of your code. Personally, I'd like to see an Avalon version (or even a Windows Forms version) just 'cuz I think it'd be prettier. : )

ASP.NET 2.0 gets a ton of deserved press, but the combination of the doubling in functionality of Windows Forms in .NET 2.0 and the new and improved No-Touch Deployment, now called ClickOnce, make smart clients an enormously compelling alternative to web apps when you know that the client is running Windows and .NET.

Michael Weinhardt, who took over my Wonders of Windows Forms column and is the co-author on the 2nd edition of my Windows Forms book, has dedicated himself to shouting the value of Windows Forms 2.0 from the rooftops. Subscribed.

Michael Herman caught onto WinFS’s real nature last year and I'm just now catching up. He points to a paper describing ontologies and points out this about WinFS: "WinFS is a knowledge repesentation, storage and synch system ...a literal implementation of a system strongly based on ontology related concepts." For the basics of ontologies for our new world-to-be, Michael recommends Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology.

Keith “Mr. Security” Brown kicks off a series of security articles on Longhorn. In this piece, Keith digs into the current plans for making Longhorn a much safer place for applications, only really giving administrator privileges to applications with a special need for them, regardless of the privileges of the user running the applications. This is a core piece of taking back our computers from the world's hackers and Keith lays out the basics nicely.