Markus Mielke, a PM on the Avalon team, provides some performance tips on Avalon inheritable properties, centrally shared resources and property triggers.

Marc Clifton, a concerned 3rd party, provides thoughtful criticism of XAML.

Chris Anderson, Avalon Architect, takes Marc’s criticism and provides a thoughtful response.

Because of where we are in the Longhorn release cycle, i.e. a long way from a release, if the Avalon team agrees with Marc, they can make real changes.

As a result, Longhorn gets better because it’s able to accept early, critical feedback. Perfect.

Ian's piece says to evolve an SOA endpoint that you're best off creating and running a new service along side the old one. He takes 2267 words to say what I said in 20, but it’s still a joy to wind your way down Ian’s road. : )

Today, Joe Marini, a Microsoft PM on a project that dare not speak it’s name, posts a blog reader built entirely in XAML, i.e. no .NET code.

Last week, Chris Anderson, an Architect on the Avalon team, showed us that Avalon requires no XAML at all if you don’t want to use it.

However, closer to the truth are Don and ChrisAn, Longhorn architects, on using a mixture of XAML for declarative UI tasks and code for handling events.

My own preferred model is to do just as much as I can in XAML, because I find declarative style coding more flexible, but to put into code what makes sense, e.g. most event handling. My line in the sand is this: if I would have to embed code in the XAML, I go to real code, otherwise, I use XAML.

I used to live and die with Visual Studio Service Packs and the DevDiv Sustaining Engineering team has just released another SP for you Visual C++ 6 and Visual Basic 6 programmers. Millions of folks still use these products and it warms my heart that we're 2.5 generations past this, but still releasing SPs. I don't anticipate any more of them, though, so I recommend using this SP for your current projects and moving to Visual Studio .NET 2003 or Visual Studio 2005 on the next one, depending on the timing.

Tony Schreiner has 2 more pieces on changes in IE in XPSP2 bringing the total to 3:

• Authenticode - No and never again!
• Information Bar - Stopping the modal dialog madness
• Web Site Compatibility

I especially appreciate the Information Bar, which I’d describe as a status bar at the top of the window. I hate modal dialogs, so not stopping what I’m doing to inform me of something is nice. Plus, studies show that nobody ever looks at the bottom of the screen for info, so putting the InfoBar at the top makes a lot more sense.

Also, I’ve got XPSP2 RC1 on one of my machines that was plagued with pop-ups and web crap of all kinds. Now, all of that is gone and I’ve got a lot more info about things that sites were doing that no longer works, but I didn’t want them doing that stuff anyway.

Here.

I’ve had 2600 comic books bagged and boxed in my garage since I’ve had a garage. These are comics that I collected as a kid and had always planned on turning into Benjamins. However, when doing a massive do-it-yourself Clean Sweep on my entire house, I figured it was time. But I couldn’t sell them to a local comic shop, as they can only give me a tiny fraction of their worth, so I immediately thought about eBay. And that’s why the comics have been sitting in my garage for so long. The mere thought of cataloging, assessing, photoing and posting all 2600, even in reasonable groups, was way more work than I was willing to do. And so they sat.

That is, until I was driving with a pack of MSLearning folks on our way to lunch recently in Redmond and came across a Bidadoo truck. I’d never heard of it, but they explained it as a new startup dedicated to taking your stuff, particularly your collections, and doing all of the grunt work to get it sold on eBay, including bringing in experts to help them figure out exactly what’s what. So I spent 5 hours putting making a list of what was in my 9 long comic boxes, hauled them up to their “showroom” in Redmond and now they’re getting ready to put my entire comic collection on eBay for 33% off to top. They’ve got 34 of my X-Menu comics up on eBay in 6 bundles now and they’ll be doing the rest directly.

So, in summary, buy my comics and check out Bidadoo (if for no other reason than their fun name — I’m a sucker for double meanings : ).

The tables are well and truly turned from when I interviewed Carl with Rory acting as color man to where Rory is hosting and I’m just there to fill a seat. The guest is Tony Bain, who is new to me, and the topic is SQL Server apps, which, while I'm familiar with the technology, hasn't been part of my production quality app work since embedded SQL was the rage (and I miss it!). Should be interesting at the very most. : )