Wow. This looks really cool.

[from Mike Swanson]

Gene Webb, Microsoft developer evangelist, has posted the recorded LiveMeeting Indigo SDR (Software Design Review) dry-run videos and slides. And as if that weren’t enough, you can see Steve Swartz, Indigo Architect, give an intro to Indigo on MSDN TV.

I remember a day when SDRs were deep, secret mojo that even folks that knew about them were special, let along actually attending them. Now, we’re posting them on the internet. I love my company.

[from Aaron Skonnard]

You can hear Omri sing a few bars of “These are a few of my favorite things” to the tune of Indigo.

What with the public availability of the Avalon and Indigo CTPs and our stated goal of pre-beta bit releases to gather feedback, you might wonder, "But where should this feedback go?" I'll tell you where to go -- the MSDN Product Feedback Center, which now has entries for Avalon and Indigo. Hog pile on the WinFX API product teams!

Steve Maine of Brain.Save() has done a really good job on the description of a set of duplex contracts in Indigo, i.e. those contracts where callbacks are specified, using the design of a multi-player game of blackjack. Steve shows the service contract interfaces, a bunch of the messaging code and even what's on the wire. Recommended.

It took a coupla days more than we wanted ’cuz I was fighting with some internal tools, but the March 2005 Avalon/Indigo CTP is available for public download.

Make sure you follow the instructions on the download page and only use it with the February CTP release of Visual Studio 2005, i.e. don’t use it against the Whidbey beta 2 that’ll “coming soon*” to a theater near you.

* for some definition of “coming soon…”

Chris Anderson has updated XamlPad for the March 2005 CTP of Avalon and renamed it AvPad. As a tool for learning and experimenting with XAML/Avalon, it can't be beat. Enjoy!

Scott Swigart has a nice video demo of putting the Smart Client Offline Application Block to use. Enjoy!