Patrick Thompson, a PM on the WinFS team, talks about how types are defined in WinFS and how to extend them and create your own (although the extensibility of WinFS isn't enabled in the PDC bits).

In this chapter, Brent Rector provides his overview of WinFS, including the programming model and how to access items from the WinFS API and via SQL directly (the latter sounds a lot more fun that it is : ).

Jeff Bogdan, one of the chief architects on the Microsoft Avalon team, kicks off the new Avalon column that he shares with Chris Anderson, the other chief architect on the Avalon team. These guys know Avalon because they had a hand in inventing it, so I'm *very* much looking forward to this column. Recommended.

Yasser Shohoud, a member of the Indigo team at Microsoft, kicks off his new Indigo column with a walk-through of how to get started programming Indigo using the Visual Studio .NET templates that come with the Longhorn SDK. Yasser is also the author of the well-regarded Real World XML Web Services: For VB and VB .NET Developers, so I'm looking forward to more discussions of how to apply Indigo in the real world. Recommended.

The new .NET site TheServerSide.NET has an interview with Don Box on Indigo.

This month, Mike Weinhardt takes over for me on the Wonder of Windows Forms column so that I can concentrate on Longhorn. Mike is the co-author on the 2e of Windows Forms Programming book and a co-author with me on a couple of Windows Forms Designer integration pieces for MSDN Magazine, so he's well qualified. Plus, as an Ozzie, he's got quite an interesting outlook. Recommended.

Joe has a particularly dim view of where we’ve come with GUIs in the last 10 years. In fact, it’s much more dim than my own view. On the other hand, I think he nails one point:

“There is a core set of patterns that are repeated over and over in thousands of applications, each of which has their own subtly different behavior and visuals. Back and forward, undo and redo, delete, find, bookmark, etc… And there are a core set of graphical objects like images, text, maps, and calendars, which everybody has to reinvent every time they need one in their application, and they usually do a lousy job of reinventing it. Sure, there are classes for some of these things in GUI libraries, but the user doesn’t see that - they see the programmer’s personal interpretation of how they think it should look and work.”

As a app builder in my heart, I absolutely want the tools to build *good* applications, not just *pretty* applications.

Holy cow! Windows Forms Programming in C# is #10 on the list of best-selling Microsoft-related books. I'd like to thank the academy...