In the 2nd installment of my series rebuilding Solitaire using Longhorn technologies, I dive into 2 of the 5 Avalon families, specifically controls and panels, and build something that is at least approaching how Sol is supposed to look.

Robert Scoble and I walked around MSDN last week with a camera and here’s the first snippet where I talk about my experiences building Solitaire for Longhorn. Watching it now, it seems to me that I need to chill a bit and maybe take a breath now and again. : )

Karsten continues his dig into the Fundamentals Pillar of Longhorn by describing the 3 main points of the new configuration settings infrastructure of Longhorn:

1. Configuration schema, which allows settings to be schematized based on XML
2. Configuration engine that has a suite of APIs for reading and writing configuration settings
3. Optimized configuration store that can be synched with legacy stores such as the registry, INI files, etc.

Karsten also points out a tool (wcmedit.exe) for browsing the configuration store and a sample (Longhorn SDK->Samples->WMI->WMI.Configuration Sample 1).

Personally, I’ve never been happy with the various configuration settings stories of any of the Windows OSes, so I’m happy to see this problem tackled again. And if this new way of handling application and user configuration settings doesn’t meet your needs, let us know!

I’ve been silent myself on the real status of WinFS simply because I didn’t know enough to really say (although I did ask some of my internal friends who knew more to speak out). One person I didn’t even think to ask was Jeremey Mazner, a Longhorn Technical Evangelist who spends quite a bit of time WinFS.

Jeremey’s bottom line: none of the cuts affect the message from the PDC or the slides or code samples that he uses to show off the benefits of WinFS. He goes on to provide supporting evidence from inside and to speculate on where the stories to the contrary came from in the press.

That doesn’t mean that WinFS or any of the other Longhorn features we showed off at the PDC won’t take cuts in the future as we drive for our ship date, but as of right now, Jeremey has detected any real cuts in WinFS.

Karsten J rebel’s against the lack of coverage of the Fundamentals pillar of Longhorn, sketching an overview of why the Fundamentals in Longhorn are cool and also delving into a specific feature he likes (the nextgen Longhorn Event Log).

Also, if you’re looking for more Fundamentals resources, check out the Fundamentals Pillar page on the Longhorn Developer Center, which lists the Fundamentals PDC Talks, several fundamentals articles (including a nice overview of ClickOnce for Longhorn) and the WinFX Fundamentals newsgroup.

Channel9 has some interesting quicky videos of Joe Beda covering a number of Avalon-related goodies:

• Managed vs. unmanaged, how much of Avalon was done that way?
• What 3D capabilities will Longhorn/Avalon provide?
• What hardware will Longhorn/Avalon need?
• How should developers prepare for Longhorn/Avalon?
• Managed vs. unmanaged, how much of Avalon was built in .NET?
• Are all of Avalon’s APIs available to .NET programmers?
• Is Avalon a way to take over the Web?

I got all this from the Channel9 Video RSS Feed. You should, too.

Carter’s got another concept video for us, this time for manufacturing.

In general, if you haven’t seen the concept videos, they’re a fantastic way to see what the heck we’re trying to enable with Longhorn.

Jason Olson, an enterprising 3rd party, posts a look at the benefits of knowing about threading when building an entire UI stack from scratch. Instead of requiring you to transition from a worker thread to the UI thread to talk to a control, Avalon lets you grab the UI context that owns the control and party on:

void ShowProgress(int secondsElapsed) {

     try {

          this.Context.Enter();

          txtSeconds.Text = secondsElapsed.ToString();

     }

     finally {

          this.Context.Exit();

     }

}

This is far simpler code than what would be required in code based on User32. Nice.

UPDATE: Ian Griffiths points out that the code can be even sweeter!