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.

Here.

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.

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. : )