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.

Here.

This week, Christophe Nasarre, one of the best reviewers on my Windows Forms book, has written a 3-article series on the new command line build system and the new build core of Visual Studio 2005: MSBuild. In this installment, Christophe starts from the ground floor, building the most basic .proj files and then exploring the advanced features you need to control your builds.

Also, because MSBuild is still under development, this piece covers the details of both the MSBuild in the Longhorn PDC bits as well as the most recent Visual Studio 2005 technology preview.

I work closely with Vic and Steve on the strategy for Longhorn content and activies, so I’m planning to tune it to today’s .NET Rocks.