If you read Ian’s article on Avalon Graphics Composition before the fireworks, you missed a wonderful discussion of how Avalon compares with Apple’s Quartz and Quartz Extreme. Not only does Ian respond to the ever popular “Doesn’t Mac OS X already do today what Longhorn will do tomorrow?” with a resounding “No!” but he does it in such a thorough manner, that you can’t help be admire it.

You go, Ian! : )

Here.

I find it unbelievable that after umpteen books, I finally seem to have blended quality with quantity as the C# version of my WinForms book enters it’s 3rd printing after only 8 months in publication. Wahoo!

This time, Ryan digs into the RTC stack in Longhorn to build an IM app to enable synchronized browsing and chatting. Includes source code and a meaty write-up, including Ryan's complaints about the current RTC stack.

I'm really getting to like Benjamin’s Mitchell’s blog as a Reader's Digest of various issues that he's following. This time, he summarizes advise from across three MS architects providing guidance on where to draw boundaries between services.

Mark Parks, a PM on the Visual C# Debugger QA team, has posted ways to fix common VS.NET debugger problems. He’s even got a fix for why I can’t debug the localhost version of my site. Thanks, Mark!

[via Duncan Mackenzie]

Finally, Jim has set up a PND that's not through rush hour traffic from my house. 3/23, 6:30pm, Washington Square Mall food court. Wahoo!

Jesus Rodriguez provides an overview of the WinFS data model, including using it for searching and notifications.

After much delay (man, this Microsoft gig keeps a person busy), I’m happy to announce Genghis v0.5:

New HtmlLinkLabel class from Jeff Key that knows how to launch IE and EXEs directly w/o requiring you to handle the event

Much prettier images in SimplePad from Chris Burrows

Updated MRU code from Michael Weinhardt to match .NET event signature conventions and to fix a problem when using more than one MRU components on a single menu

Updated FileSearchEngine code from Mike Marshall to check for whole words at beginning and end of line correctly

Updated validation code from Michael Weinhardt with support for validating controls at a container level, e.g. validating controls on a tab instead of on an entire form

New gradient progress bar from Mike Marshall

Updated FileDocument from Chris Sells to match text of Windows Forms Programming to include more MFC-like features like a pluggable scheme for serialization handling, registration of document extension with the shell, and adding to recent docs, i.e. Start->Documents

Updated HandleCollector from Ethan Brown to work with .NET 1.0 and .NET 1.1

Performance enhancements from Ethan Brown in the MappedDrives and SystemShares classes

New user-resizable panel from Ethan Brown

Updated WebCommandLineHelper from Andrew Duncan to fix System.IO.FileLoadException in ieexec.exe

Updated AniForm from Mike Marshall to support stacking ala SharpReader and fix a terminal server-related bug

Updated cool menu sample from Chris Burrows with additional support for abstracting commands from click even handlers

Enjoy.