Rob Chandler, a Microsoft Help MVP, has posted a look at where he sees User Assistance heading in Longhorn, both in the UI and in the new help system. I see Longhorn as an opportunity to crank user experience up a notch in every way and user assistance is an important part of that.

I’m a big cmd.exe user and was a big Korn Shell user before that, so command shells are an important part of my life and thus, I’m skeptical of new ones. However, I’ve been drooling over MSH (the Microsoft Shell — codename Monad) ever since I first saw it. In fact, when I saw Karsten’s post on getting the Monad bits for Windows XP and 2003, I was much excited. Then, I saw the Fundamentals Pillar topic on The .NET Show, which featured Jeffrey Snover (The Father of Monad) in the back half of the show and I was hooked. The way he told the Monad story motivated me to register for the public beta of Monad via Karsten’s instructions and wait impatiently over the weekend to be awarded permissions to download the bits.

Which I promptly installed on the WinHEC build of Longhorn (build 4074), even though it’s only supported for Windows XP and Windows 2003.

As it turns out, Longhorn comes with an earlier preview of Monad, but it’s much older than the latest Monad drop. So, I installed the latest Monad on the latest Longhorn, hoping that it would work and that I could follow along with my new hero Jeffrey.

And follow along I did, because not only did the latest Monad bits install and run just peachy under Longhorn, but the included Getting Started docs gave me hours of fun! With the functionality that Monad provides, I’m going to have a hard time going back to anything else.

If you’re a command-line person, I recommend getting on the Monad beta, taking it for a spin and letting those guys if there’s anything you don’t like (for example, I miss the “start” command, but I think I’ll go build it…).

Carl Franklin posts a fun segment from Michael Feldman's Whad'ya Know? radio program where 32-bit to 16-bit thunking is discussed.

Here. The one where I toot my own horn much less subtly than usual (and I'm not known for subtlety : ).

Wednesday, June 30th, 2004

I just got word from my publisher that, according to the industry-wide metrics they use, Windows Forms Programming in C# is the #1 seller in it’s category week-to-week by a wide margin over everyone but Petzold (who I’m still beating, but by a smaller margin). And while Petzold has sold more copies overall, he had a 2-year head start on me and I’m gaining. Further, earlier today, Amazon.com had the book listed as the #5 best selling computer book (although it’s at #10 right now with a sales rank of 459 and a ranking of 5 out of 5 with 52 reviews).

I normally try to toot my own horn a little more subtly than this, but the idea that I could learn Windows programming from the best-selling Windows book author of all time and then, 10 years later, beat his sales numbers makes me damn proud. Thanks to all the reviewers and folks that gave me feedback on the materials in my articles, to Shawn Wildermuth and Mike Weinhardt, who actually contributed material to the book and to Addison-Wesley for printing it (and then re-printing it, and then re-printing it… : ).

Discuss

MSDN shipped their part of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 at about 12:30am on Tuesday morning. Sara has a nice summary of the new MSDN Product Feedback Center that I think folks will find particularly satisfying:

“At the MSDN Product Feedback Center, you can submit bugs and suggestions. You can search through other people’s submitted bugs and suggestions. You can vote for your favorites. You can share workarounds. And, you can see feedback and details directly from folks on our product teams. Oh, and you can get notified when the status of an issue you’re interested in changes.”

In other words, developer feedback to the product teams for the supported products is no longer just an email or a post, but an entry in a database that the product team and you can track. I can’t wait to get this for Longhorn.

Also, Kent has announced the new Visual Studio 2005 Developer Center, complete with next-gen personalization features that we’re testing on this content before we push them out site-wide. My favorite part of the site is the bit where the product teams that contribute to .NET 2.0 point out what’s new (and the Windows Forms team even tell you how they’re progressing on the features they’re implementing).

Kent also points out the site for the new Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition, the beta of a slim and trim VS05 for students, hobbyists, etc. that you can download immediately. There’s even a contest for Express users where the prizes include an XBox and a copy of Halo 2.

Duncan also has a post where he addresses our current philosophy on coverage of shipping vs. future content on MSDN and why TechEd is going to throw it “out of whack” for a while (except me, of course, who’s going to be out of whack for a good long time : ).

NOTE: Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 will not install on Longhorn. Hopefully the next community drop of Longhorn will include a matching drop of VS05, but as of today, they remain incompatible.

There are two companies vying to be your XAML vendor today to help you get read for Longhorn tomorrow. Mobiform released an updated XAML viewer today that can convert from SVG to XAML and show XAML on your existing .NET machines. Xamlon has been on a hiring spree, today bringing on Ben Cantlon. I don't know Ben, but he's asking for suggestions on what his company can do today to move you to XAML that works on .NET today and Longhorn tomorrow.

The benefit of 3D support in Avalon is not the 3D support itself (we’ve had various ways to do 3D stuff in Windows apps for a while now, including both OpenGL and DirectX). The benefit is the tight integration we get between 3D and 2D elements in Avalon (and we’ll get even closer integration as we move closer to the Longhorn release).

For example, in his Avalon 3D Hit Testing Demo, Daniel Lehenbauer shows how hit testing can move into a ViewPort3D element (the representation of a 3D scene in an Avalon display) into the specific element being clicked. In other words, you can have a Button right next to a ViewPort3D showing a teapot and your app can easily tell which one was clicked. Handling a teapot click is slightly harder than handling a Button click simple because the Button does it’s own hit testing, but the Avalon 3D hit testing supports advanced features like clicking through the handle of the teapot w/o that being classified as a “hit,” all of which Daniel explains nicely in his sample.