Here.

Robert Hess, that .NET Show guy, talks about why he’s so into Longhorn in the recent .NET Shows lately:

“What you -do- need to pay attention to, is how ‘Longhorn’ will evolve the users concept of exactly what a Windows application is all about, and what features and functionality it should be providing them with. Many application developers should be starting to think about this TODAY, and how to begin incorporating some of these features into their application moving forward. Just the schematized file system that WinFS will introduce alone can represent not only a big jump in the potential functionality of an application, but also a considerable change in how your existing application might want to begin thinking about data storage.”

Markus Mielke, a PM on the Avalon team, provides some performance tips on Avalon inheritable properties, centrally shared resources and property triggers.

Marc Clifton, a concerned 3rd party, provides thoughtful criticism of XAML.

Chris Anderson, Avalon Architect, takes Marc’s criticism and provides a thoughtful response.

Because of where we are in the Longhorn release cycle, i.e. a long way from a release, if the Avalon team agrees with Marc, they can make real changes.

As a result, Longhorn gets better because it’s able to accept early, critical feedback. Perfect.

Today, Joe Marini, a Microsoft PM on a project that dare not speak it’s name, posts a blog reader built entirely in XAML, i.e. no .NET code.

Last week, Chris Anderson, an Architect on the Avalon team, showed us that Avalon requires no XAML at all if you don’t want to use it.

However, closer to the truth are Don and ChrisAn, Longhorn architects, on using a mixture of XAML for declarative UI tasks and code for handling events.

My own preferred model is to do just as much as I can in XAML, because I find declarative style coding more flexible, but to put into code what makes sense, e.g. most event handling. My line in the sand is this: if I would have to embed code in the XAML, I go to real code, otherwise, I use XAML.

The tables are well and truly turned from when I interviewed Carl with Rory acting as color man to where Rory is hosting and I’m just there to fill a seat. The guest is Tony Bain, who is new to me, and the topic is SQL Server apps, which, while I'm familiar with the technology, hasn't been part of my production quality app work since embedded SQL was the rage (and I miss it!). Should be interesting at the very most. : )

Marc Clifton, author of the MyXaml open source project, publishes a series of articles exploring opportunities for improvement for the Avalon architects to consider:

• Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML?–a look at “tag names are class names”
• Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML? — The joys of VisualTree
• Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML? — The case of the missing collection
• Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML? — Decorating the house of cards

I only wish that he would post his thoughts of how XAML should look.

Don Box expands on his explanation of HTTP.SYS, IIS and XPSP2, including providing a .NET Whidbey sample that uses HTTP.SYS along side of IIS6 running on XPSP2.

While it's true that a new preview version of Visual Studio 2005 is available for MSDN Subscribers, DO NOT INSTALL THIS BUILD OF VS2005 ON LONGHORN. It won't work.