The one and only time that I ever met Tim O’Reilly, I turned into fan-boy, telling him how I used to be a Unix guy and I would just buy every single “animal book,” even if I didn’t know what the topic was because the quality of the books was so high that I knew I needed to know whatever was between the covers.

Now a days, ORA produces too many quality books to purchase (or even read) them all, but I’ve been very happy to see them turn more and more of their attention towards Windows, where I’ve put all of my developer energies for more than a decade. In fact, I’ve written one book for ORA myself and I’ve got two more in the works, so I continue to be a big fan. Today they launched the Windows DevCenter, where they are concentrating and aggregating all of their considerable Windows juice. And, of course, they have an RSS feed. Subscribed!

On Monday, March 15th between 11am and 12:30pm PST, the VC++ product team will be hosting a chat on what to do with your existing C, C++ and MFC applications in the Longhorn time frame, starting with what to do now to best prepare yourself and your applications. If you're a VC++ developer, don't miss it!

By popular demand, Nikhil Kothari, a PM on the ASP.NET team, has posted the source code to his most excellent Avalon Bezier Spline Designer. This is the coolest real Longhorn thing I've seen that comes with soure. Thanks for posting the code, Nikhil!

Ryan Dawson turns his attention to Indigo, building a client and server and then adding security and reliability. In his writing, he also points out a number of pitfalls for you to avoid when getting starting with Indigo in the PDC bits.

Long before Longhorn, we'll have Whidbey and an updated Windows Forms (as well as a bunch of other updated things, but I like Windows Form : ). This article enumerates some of the updated controls in Windows Forms Whidbey. Also, stay turned for an MSDN Magazine article by Michael Weinhardt and me with a broader look at what's new in Whidbey Windows Forms (in fact, Michael has already tackled the new GridView control).

Jeremy Mazner presents his second scenario for WinFS, this time describing his idea app for event management that would be cake to implement using WinFS. In fact, I’m pretty sure you could do the whole thing in the shell.

On a related note, I was watching an internal training video on WinFS yesterday and it excited me in a way that’s not appropriate for humans to feel about technology. The enumeration, update, serialization, relationship, extensibility and notification models just all seem so *right*. I’m looking forward to another drop of the bits that enables me to extend WinFS so I can really start building stuff.

Steve Kirk has updated the Architecture Developer Center with a series of streaming video presentations about the core architectures that motivated Longhorn. Topics range Pat Helland on comparing technology architectures with city architectures to Gurdeep Singh Pall talking about real-time collaboration, which a wide range of subjects in between. If you'd like to get your head in the same place that Microsoft's architects were when the conceived of Longhorn, while still getting information that you can use today, check these out.

If you need a look at Longhorn, but you couldn't make the PDC (or you're just dying for *another* look at Longhorn), WinHEC in May is the place to be. Of course, it's also the place to be if you're a PC h/w vendor, but then, you guys already know that. : )