Tim Sneath, Avalon evangelist and all around charming fellow (maybe because his name reminds me of a Dr. Suess character?), posted a nice little tour of Avalon via the the WinFX SDK. Enjoy.

Rob Relyea, a Lead PM on the Avalon team, has posted a set of instructions for using the Avalon CTP project templates from Visual C# Express and Visual Basic Express.

Robi Khan and Mark Levison from Databeacon will be doing a MSDN DevChat on their recent commercial application using No-Touch Deployment. It’s on Wednesday, November 24, 2004 at 10am PST. I’ll be watching and you can sign up here.

I finally figured out why I need a gigabit LAN, especially at my house: the Windows Media Center Extender (mine’s for my XBOX, which I bought especially for this purpose). It lets you get at the music, video, pictures, radio, PVR, live TV and pretty much everything else that Media Center exposes, but from any TV in the house and all with the fabulous 10-fit UI that MCE provides. I had to duct tape down the extra long wire from my office to my bedroom (I explicitly left out a network connection in the bedroom when I wired the place -- who knew?) and my megabit LAN works just fine, but I can see needing more when I put one of these things on every TV in the house, which is pretty likely, since it rocks so hard. Wahoo!

Oh, and as if that weren’t enough, the XBOX Media Center Extender kit comes with a remote and remote sensor that works for playing DVDs, too, thus saving you the trouble of buying both. I’m in love!

Chris Anderson cloned an internal app for the Avalon CTP called “XamlPad” and posted it on his site. Enjoy.

This just in: Chris has posted a version of his XamlPad Clone on a server via ClickOnce so you can just run it directly (and it works, too! Wahoo!).

Plus, Ian’s posted a hack to the sample that Chris’s XamlPad Clone comes with. Fun. : )

Just in case you haven’t noticed, MSDN Subscribers should download the Avalon Community Technology Preview, which enables Avalon to run under Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and to integrate with Visual Studio 2005. Also, you can access the WinFX SDK that reference Avalon online. And as if that weren’t enough, the Avalon evangelist and product teams have teamed up to give you an overview of what’s new in this pre-release of Avalon. Of course, we’re still on the way to beta, let alone an RTM of Avalon, so there’s still plenty of time to give the Avalon team feedback about what you love and don’t love in the Avalon newsgroup.

And as if that we’re enough, here’s some views and news about the Avalon CTP:

• 3rd public release of Avalon…a few details on the development experience
• Avalon CTP released!!!
• And So It Starts Again… Avalon Community Technical Preview Released
• Avalon is Back
• Microsoft gives developers a glimpse of Avalon
• Microsoft Previews Avalon for Developers
• Microsoft Releases Avalon Tech Preview for XP, 2003
• Early Avalon Build Is Out, But Not for Longhorn
• Avalon CTP Release - bring on the 3D!
• XAML Tidbits Previewed in Microsoft’s Avalon
• Microsoft’s Avalon Will Make Networked Applications Smarter

In the words of Chris Anderson, Architect on the Avalon team, “This is not the final API set, XAML spec, or anything else - this is a ‘Technology Preview’”. And still, I’ve spent all day installing in on my machine. Wahoo!

Channel9 has a nice video of Scott Garvey, a Microsoft Smart Client Evangelist, talking about what’s a smart client and what’s not. Scott also discussed some examples of smart clients, e.g. eBay for "power sellers."

For me, things boil down this way: if it’s something I’ve got to spend significant time in, I really want it to be a smart client, otherwise I’m going to get frustrated. For example, Outlook Web Access is great for occasional use from any PC under the sun, but if I’m using it for more than 5 minutes, I’m guaranteed to press a hotkey like Ctrl+A and get nothing like I expect, forcing me to find my laptop so I can get some real work done in Outlook.

According to Rich Salz’s reading of the WSDL 2.0 spec (Rich makes a living selling hardware to make XML smoke, so I think he knows), the following is legal WSDL 2.0:

#include "wsdl.h"
extern void hello_world(const char* text);

It’s hisjudgmentt that this is not a step forward and I’m having a hard time finding fault with his argument. : )