If you haven’t yet submitted your abstract to the Applied XML Developer’s Conferences, don’t wait much longer; I’m only accepting submissions ’til the end of June, 2004.

I’ve already gotten a ton of abstracts, including submissions from folks like Sam Rub, Tim Bray, Tim Ewald and Don Box, but that doesn’t mean that your talk won’t bubble up to the top; as much as I like to have the polished speakers, I like even more to have the folks from the trenches.

According to current thinking, the conference is likely to be 9/30 - 10/1 within an hour of the Portland Airport, although details are still being finalized.

Submit your abstract today!

Joe Nalewabau has one very important addition point to make about the new key bindings in Visual C# 2005: while the VC# team will be providing a bunch of key bindings based on how things are arranged, e.g. Ctrl+W, S to show the Solution Explorer from the Window menu, 90+% of the old key bindings will continue to work, e.g. Ctrl+Alt+L to show the Solution Explorer. I worry that the 90% coverage won't be like uptime, where 90% is generally just fine, but more like speech recognition, where anything less than 99.9% just bugs people. I'm keeping my key bound fingers crossed...

Chris Anderson just did a fabulous job describing what makes Avalon more extensible than existing popular UI frameworks. What Avalon allows is the ability to have a Button instance like so:

<Window>
  <Button>Hello</Button>
<Window>

And then, somewhere else, using Styles, setting the VisualTree of what a Button looks like to be whatever you like, e.g.

<Style>
  <Button />
  <Style.VisualTree>
    <FlowPanel>
      <!-- anything you like in here,
e.g. <Text>, <Video>, <Rectangle>, whatever -->
      <ContentPresenter />
    </FlowPanel>
  </Style.VisualTree>
</Style>

Two interesting things about this button style. The first is that you can make a Button look however you want it to look, without worrying whether the Avalon team had that in mind up front. Two, when you want to drop in the content inside the Button tag, e.g. “Hello”, you drop in the ContentPresentor and it knows how to display what was placed in the Button (again, which could be anything). Simple and flexible: two things that I’m finding to be true more and more about Avalon the further I dig.

If you’re using Longhorn 4074 and MSBuild is telling you this, ‘The target “GetOutputAssembly” does not exist in the project.’, then try these steps to solve the problem:

• Backup %windows%\microsoft.net\windows\v6.0.4030\WindowsCommon.Target because you’re about to modify it

• In WindowsCommon.Target, replace all GetOutputAssembly with BuildOutputGroup

• Save and Close WindowsCommon.Target

• Re-run MSBuild and enjoy

Joe Nalewabau, a Lead PM on the Visual C# team, admitted today that he was responsible for the VC# keyboard randomization process for Visual Studio 2005 and describes the thought process that he went through to get there. I admit that Joe makes a good case for changing the key bindings, but I hate the idea of learning a whole new set (especially since, because I’m a keyboard boy, I’ll be crippled until I learn the new bindings). If Joe would swear on a stack of user manuals that the key bindings would never, ever change again, I’d be happier about it. (Rocky: “Again? That trick never works!“ Bullwinkle: “This time fur shure!“)

Of course, what I think doesn’t matter (it stopped mattering when I signed that damned employment contract : ). It’s what you think that matters and you should feel free to let him know what you think about the new VC# 2005 key bindings.

“If you’re familiar with data binding in Windows Forms or ASP.NET, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. In this presentation, Chris Sells, Content Strategist for the MSDN Longhorn Developer Center Web site, will cover data binding in Avalon, the new UI stack in Longhorn, Microsoft’s next OS. Chris will cover the basics of data binding and then move into transformers, filters and styling. If you’re going to build UIs in Avalon, you’d be crazy not to use data binding to do it.”

Data Binding in Avalon
6/24/2004, 6:30pm
Portland Community College Auditorium, Room 104
1626 SE Water Avenue
Portland, OR

If you hit the Microsoft-Watch web site often enough (it's been on 3 of my last 4 visits), you'll see my smiling face as a giant banner ad. Hell, I don't even put my picture up on my own site (well, except this one...)! Maybe they've got too many hits on their web site and instead of taking it down without warning, they're using my picture to scare folks away. ; )

Some quotes from Anders on Channel9:

“On of the things that we are trying to think about deeply in C# 3.0 is this big gap that I still see between general purpose languages and databases… Anyone who’s building an enterprise app is using both worlds… There’s certainly a lot of progress we can make by truly marrying these worlds… It’s nothing but mismatch. We gotta do away with that.”

Now that we’ve removed memory management from my code and between InitializeComponent and XAML, we’ve removed the need to write UI layout code, the next big chunk that gums up the works is data integration code. To have Anders thinking about how to extend C# 3.0 to mitigate this problem has me all a tingle!