If you care about Longhorn, start first with Whidbey. According to Scott Guthrie, the first Whidbey beta will be available in June.

[via Kent Sharkey]

Jason Nadal builds a useful smart client application in Longhorn for language translation. It’s a simple front-end to a web service, but it’s the first real custom app for Longhorn I’ve seen that doesn’t have to do with demonstrating or building for the platform.

Here.

Nathan Dunlap and Jonathan Russ work together as designer and coder to build splitting bars in Avalon:

“Boy was I happy when he got back to me with a really simple solution that I have found is really easy to reuse in a lot of scenarios. I love experiences that really show me that the designer/developer split is going to be really graceful. It’s pretty cool when the design can start with me mocking up something and handing it off to the developer who can then build logic into it. It’s even better when the developer logic isn’t so intertwined with my styles and layout that I can hardly touch it without breaking something. This way I get to use my design skills at the prototype stages and early skeletal stages, and I also get to get my hands dirty in the real code at the fit and finish stages. All you designers who have spent hours refining your designs only to have your designs mangled when they get implemented in real code… your day is coming.”

BTW, if it seems like a list a lot of community Avalon pieces on my site, it’s because there’s a lot of community activity in Avalon. If you’re doing WinFS or Indigo work and I’m not seeing it, please let me know!

Ironically, his page is filled with bugs…

[via Stuart Celarier, the real Longhorn Stuart]

Ian Griffiths posts the beginnings of a XAML editor (it supports squares and elipses and saving, but not loading XAML, so no source yet). Especially interesting, however, is how he handles zooming. He wrote an explanation with source on that bit.

BTW, if you haven’t figured it out yet, Ian is quite the Avalon boy. If you’re into such things, you should subscribe to his blog.

Here. This looks *very* cool. Can't *wait* to see the source code. Hurry up, Nikhil! So long as it compiles and runs, we'll be forgiving. : )

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. : )