Carter’s got another concept video for us, this time for manufacturing.

In general, if you haven’t seen the concept videos, they’re a fantastic way to see what the heck we’re trying to enable with Longhorn.

Jason Olson, an enterprising 3rd party, posts a look at the benefits of knowing about threading when building an entire UI stack from scratch. Instead of requiring you to transition from a worker thread to the UI thread to talk to a control, Avalon lets you grab the UI context that owns the control and party on:

void ShowProgress(int secondsElapsed) {

     try {

          this.Context.Enter();

          txtSeconds.Text = secondsElapsed.ToString();

     }

     finally {

          this.Context.Exit();

     }

}

This is far simpler code than what would be required in code based on User32. Nice.

UPDATE: Ian Griffiths points out that the code can be even sweeter!

There seems to be a common misconception that since Avalon windows/pages are/can be declared in markup (XAML), it must be a web killer/reach solution. It’s not.

In this short video, Joe Beda, answers the question of whether Avalon is meant to replace HTML/the web (it’s not) and what’s Avalon’s message of “best of the web/best of Windows” message is really about, e.g. ease of deployment for Avalon apps like web apps, accessing central services for data and functionality (using web services instead of client UI generation), etc.

Channel9 has a Longhorn Wiki and on it, Adam Kinney has started a list of Longhorn Blogs. Want to add your own? Click on the Edit link on the top left.

Here.

In his June ’03 Bugslayer column, John Robbins made a sideways comment when discussing Son of Strike (SOS), a debugging extension from Microsoft for doing all kinds of low-level, mixed native and managed code debugging.

What Jon said was this: “Interestingly, starting with Visual Studio® .NET 2003, you can load SOS when doing mixed-mode debugging.” And then he didn’t say how to load SOS into VS.NET, even after spending the rest of the article telling us how cool SOS was.

Luckily, Mike Stanton, an SDE on the CLR team, has created a set of instructions for loading SOS into VS.NET. Actually, he posted those instructions in December of last year, but it wasn’t ’til today that they were accurate because it wasn’t ’til today that I tried them and couldn’t get them to work. Now they are and I can and I have all kinds of low-level goodness to explore with Son of Strike.

Here. The one where I ask a professor friend how to help my wayward, non-computer scientist friends up to speed on the foundation of our industry (which would be computer science, not greed : ).

I gave a talk at the Twin Cities .NET User Group in Minneapolis in January and I met a guy there building a web sit to crawl .NET source code on the web. I didn't get his contact info and he didn't email me, so I don't know how to get a hold of him. If that's you, please drop me a line. Thanks!

Wow. I've seen bits and drops of Whidbey (I'm limited to builds that work on Longhorn), so haven't seen the grand, overall vision of it. In the latest Microsoft Developer Tool Roadmap, they whole darn thing is laid out and the new stuff goes on forever! Details are presented for IDE enhancements, language enhancements for VB, C#, C++ and J#, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, devices, ADO.NET, web services, Office, SQL Server, Analysis and Design (aka "Whitehorse") and even a bit about what's coming in Longhorn on the tools side. Holy New Stuff, Batman!