If the reality is anything like the concept videos, I want it!

Wei-Meng Lee takes a first look at the WinHEC build of Longhorn for O'Reilly. It's a user-centric look at Longhorn, but I learned stuff. : )

As another company started by a DevelopMentor alumnus, Wangdera is the union of two consultants so perfect together, they actually got married (I believe it was a marriage arranged by their respective clients, but they’ve come to love each other : ).

In addition to being an MIT grad (they turned me away), a DevelopMentor alumnus of great repute, one of the chief developers on the next-gen MSDN web infrastructure, Craig is also the official, self-appointed sellsbrothers.com grammar checker, which should be worth your business all by itself!

And while we're on companies formed by ex-DevelopMentorites, check out Relevance, LLC, a software contracting and content creation firm founded by Stuart Halloway and Justin Geghtland, the former DevelopMentor CTO and Head of IT, respectively. Justin was the co-author of the VB.NET version of Windows Forms book and Stuart did some very cool Gen<X> work, so I'm big fans of both of them. Relevance has been around for a while and are already doing all kinds of interesting projects, but if you can get them for your interesting project, you won't be sorry.

For of my most respected colleagues, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, Aaron Skonnard and Mike Woodring, have split off from DevelopMentor to form PluralSight, a training and content creation company. Between the four of them, they've authored more than 10 books and 175 technical articles and have more than 50 years of collective experience in all many of technical pursuits in the Windows development community. Good luck, guys!

As Wesner notes, the Longhorn SDK lists 3 distinct Avalon applications types: Windows/Forms apps, multi-page apps and documents. The beauty of Avalon is that it brings so many together, apps/documents, multi-window apps/multi-page apps, text/images/video/audio, 2D/3D, etc. And to answer Wesner, Microsoft will provide editing tools for Avalon beyond Notepad (someday…).

After spending a bunch of time with various partial IBindingList implementations, I just stumbled onto a brand new one in the Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview: BindingList<T>. It’s not done yet, e.g. sorting doesn’t work, but the model is certainly what you’d want, e.g. you create a BindingList<Person>, bind it to something smart, like a DataGrid or a DataGridView, and you’re able to edit instances of your custom type or add or remove instances, as well as search or sort instances, just like you’d need a custom implementation of IBindingList for today. Very nice.

Newsgroups, mailing lists, web forums and blogs (with comments) are all very similar. Fundamentally, they’ll all about posts and replies. Sometimes the posts are replicated to servers around the world, acccepting replies in the same way. Sometimes the posts are replicated to a set of subscribers via SMTP and replies come in via POP3. Sometimes the posts are part of a web page and provided via HTTP, using HTML forms to take replies. Sometimes the posts are served up via a centralized server using HTTP + RSS or HTML, accepting responses via HTML forms or the CommentAPI. Fundamentally, it’s all the same thing, though: posts and replies. Why do I have to suffer with the limitations of any one of these protocols just to hang out with my friends to talk shop?

I don’t like newsgroups because I don’t like having a separate reader outside of my mail reader (and NewsGator ain’t anywhere close to what I want yet). Plus, newsgroups are very susceptible to spam, although the MS newsgroups are carefully patrolled to kill it before it spreads.

I don’t like web forums because I either have to poll the site (which RSS has cured me of) or the integration of the forum into my mail reader is limited to notification only. Plus, every single web forum has a vastly different UI and set of features and the inconsistencies bug me. On the other hand, web forums are pushing the envelope on features that I really want, like author and content ratings. I love mailing lists, but don’t want to duplicate any of the WinFX newsgroups in mailing lists just yet to avoid fracturing the budding developer community.

Blogs are wonderful, of course, and RSS is the only thing that’s worth me spinning up a whole separate reader than my mail reader, but it’s impossible to follow a thread of conversation between blogs or comments on other people’s blogs. On the other hand, the server-per-poster model is great because I can just subscribe to the posters that I like, increasing the signal to noise ratio substantially.

I think we should pack all of the features of mailing lists, newsgroups, web forums and blogs into a single backend and expose it via HTTP, NNTP, SMTP/POP3 and RSS as appropriate. Is it time for a new protocol that can be dumbed down to the existing protocols for the diehards that won’t give up their readers of choice? Personally, I’d like to get everything via SMTP/POP3 except for my RSS feeds (although I don’t know why — maybe it’s just that I can’t seem to get a handle on a keyboard-only mode for RSS reading in NewsGator the way I can in SharpReader…).

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