Rob Relyea, a Lead PM on the Avalon team, posts some history of XAML as well as a description of how it’s compiled into BAML and then into code. He also talks about CAML, which is used today in the PDC bits, but going away in the future.

I love these kinds of posts (and these kinds of articles) because they provide insight into what the designers of a particular technology had in mind, making it so much easier to learn. Having spent years of my life reverse-engineering the intentions of the COM designers out of the header files (because the docs and marketing materials actually pointed us in the wrong direction), it’s great when the folks behind the technology spill their guts. Thanks Chris and Jeff and Rob (and Mike and Don and the rest of the MS bloggers).

The shell-meister himself, Dino Esposito, digs into the one of the most prominent of the new shell features in Longhorn — the Sidebar — by showing you how to add your own tile, including how to create the flyout and properties views and how to extend the context menu. Sample code included. Enjoy.

It's interesting to see an Internet-based company talk about using smart client technologies to provide their customers with a richer experience than they could provide over the web. I roamed the country for years talking to folks about Windows Forms and No-Touch Deployment for their internal stuff and they ate it up. When Whidbey ships and provides ClickOnce capabilities for Windows Forms apps, attaining Internet-reach with smart clients becomes feasible *much* sooner than Longhorn.

I don't know what a "Meetup" is, but I signed up for a “Longhorn Meetup” in 97007 (and I wasn't the first). Will it hurt?

Robert Hess kicks off a series of Longhorn episodes on The .NET Show with a Longhorn overview, featuring some of the major movers and shakers behind the technology and then, of course, some shenanigans from none other than the poster children of coding for Longhorn, Don "Outofthe" Box and Chris "Mr." Anderson.

Wes muses on whether XAML could become a “standard” document format for even custom types. Certainly, if a document was serialized in XAML using custom types instead of in a custom format, it would save some translation to/from the Avalon object model…

If you’ve noticed Stuart Celarier stalking the WinFX newsgroups lately, it’s because he’s been gathering the best stuff for use in his new Longhorn Developer FAQ.

Plus, Stuart’s got all kinds of cool FAQ features, like expanding/contracting items and URLs for each category and for each item. Even cooler, the source document is a WordML document that Stuart authors in Word and then translates into HTML for the MSDN site using an XSLT. It’s a very cool model for FAQs in general and I know that Stuart’s planning to share the FAQ framework on his site.

And, if you’ve got an feedback on the FAQ items or would like to see new ones (or would like to hire him — he’s amazing with all things XML), feel free to send him an email.

“Carl interviews developer and author Brian Noyes. Brian has focused his studies and development efforts on Smart Client development, and in this interview brings us from AutoDeployment of Windows Forms applications into ClickOnce, the next-generation deployment and update technology from Microsoft that will ship with the .NET Framework 2.0. We talk about the issues around AutoDeployment, and how Microsoft is addressing those issues with ClickOnce.”

ClickOnce debuts in Whidbey and will be a big part of the deployment story in Longhorn.