While Rory’s virtual pet sidebar tile sample isn’t especially useful for a corporate desktop (although maybe a “virtual employee” version could be used to screen potential managers before they’re inflicted on unsuspecting “real” employees… : ), it does show off the intended usage for the sidebar: stuff that you absolutely, positively have to look at all day long.

As an example of what I mean, consider a typical example: the weather tile. Do you really need to know what the weather is all day long? Do you need to know it enough to take up valuable screen real estate to show it to you? I know I don’t.

But, do you need to see a virtual pet all day long? You do if it’s important enough to want to run it and keep it happy. Do you want to remember to flip to it all day long as an app running in the background? Nope. And that’s why it’s a perfect tile sample. If you run it at all, it’s important enough to take up screen real estate all day long.

You can read about these and other interesting sidebar guidelines in the sidebar section of the Longhorn User Experience guide (still under construction, of course). If you’ve got any feedback, the UX team would *love* to hear it.

Not only does Kenny show a cool little XAML animation sample, he does it in my favorite writing style.

I’ve always loved writers that start with something I’m familiar, in this case, a star defined in a hunk of XAML, and then build it up to add new features, in this case color, opacity, scale and rotation animations. The reason I love this style is that if I’m at a computer, I can follow along, folding the new features into my code and learning how things work by doing it. Or, if I’m reading the piece in the bathtub (which happens surprisingly often), I can build the code in my head (at least, ’til I get one of those cool waterproof military laptops).

Kenny’s piece almost does that, but the initial showing of the <TransformCollection> is shown without context, so it’s hard to know where it goes in the growing piece of XAML I was working on. Still, he follows it up a few sentences later with the entire XAML sample, so I can see the context. If he’d have been a little more explicit about the details of the animations he was applying and had wrapped it up with a summary, it would’ve been nearly perfect.

Oh, and animations in Avalon are cool, too. : )

Adam Kinney's at it again, this time with a sample of changing an Avalon object’s animation properties dynamically to develop an interactive game-like effect. Very cool.

“A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”
Unknown (to me : )

In this installment of the Longhorn Foghorn, I start my Longhorn implementation of the venerable Windows Solitaire. There is no interesting code yet, but I have explored some of the same decisions any developer will face when starting their first Longhorn application from scratch. Enjoy.

Ryan's at it again, this time with a custom Avalon control that adds spell-checking to the built in TextBox control.

Robert Scoble, Longhorn Evangelist at Microsoft, is interviewed on Microsoft’ search engine plans, including those provided in Longhorn by WinFS. Take this with a grain of salt like all advance info on Longhorn, but interesting nonetheless.

Ian and I are writing an Avalon book for O’Reilly and Associates together, but he’s way out in front of me, writing cool stuff like how to get rubber band selection outlines in Avalon. He also starts with a wonderful history of the XOR technique we used to use in Windows and why we no longer need it. In fact, we don’t even need XOR in Windows Forms and GDI+ today, although lots of folks don’t know that.

The key trick in Ian’s implementation is putting a hidden <Rectangle> element into your XAML document so that when it’s time to do the rubber hand outline, you can show it, move it and resize it based on where the mouse is, hiding the Rectangle again when the mouse button is released. This lets Avalon take care of the drawing, making this technique a thing of beauty.

Mitch Walker, the Terrarium guy at MS, posts some tantalizing screen shots from the Longhorn version of Terrarium under development and uses them to discuss the three steps to building skinning support into your Avalon apps. Thanks, Mitch, and when are we going to get Terrarium.Longhorn? : )