Ryan's at it again, this time with a custom Avalon control that adds spell-checking to the built in TextBox control.

You know that dialog that comes up when an app crashes and asks you if you'd like to send the error report to MS? You probably know that MS uses this information extensively to track down issues with their own software. You probably don't know that as an ISV, you can sign up to retrieve this data for your own apps, provide custom error messages and/or resolutions to your customers that report these errors and even write code to put customized information into these errors. And, to the best of my knowledge, it don't cost nuthin'.

Here. Robert Scoble, Longhorn Evangelist at Microsoft, is interviewed on Microsoft' search engine plans, including those provided in Longhorn by WinFS. Take this with a grain of salt like all advance info on Longhorn, but interesting nonetheless.

A month or so back, Carl and I were hanging out and it occured to me that while Carl had been interviewing famous folks all over the place on his .NET Rocks Show, he hadn’t been interviewed himself. So, Rory and I turned the tables on him. What results in Carl rambling on in pure bliss for almost two hours. Enjoy. : )

Ian and I are writing an Avalon book for O’Reilly and Associates together, but he’s way out in front of me, writing cool stuff like how to get rubber band selection outlines in Avalon. He also starts with a wonderful history of the XOR technique we used to use in Windows and why we no longer need it. In fact, we don’t even need XOR in Windows Forms and GDI+ today, although lots of folks don’t know that.

The key trick in Ian’s implementation is putting a hidden <Rectangle> element into your XAML document so that when it’s time to do the rubber hand outline, you can show it, move it and resize it based on where the mouse is, hiding the Rectangle again when the mouse button is released. This lets Avalon take care of the drawing, making this technique a thing of beauty.

Here. Mitch Walker, the Terrarium guy at MS, posts some tantalizing screen shots from the Longhorn version of Terrarium under development and uses them to discuss the three steps to building skinning support into your Avalon apps. Thanks, Mitch, and when are we going to get Terrarium.Longhorn? : )

Shawn Morrissey (my boss) posted some questions he asked at UPenn’s Wharton School of Business:

• Explain a database to a young child.
• Explain the Internet to your grandparents
• What is your favorite web site? Why? Now improve it.
• Steve Jobs calls and asks you to improve the iPod. Go. (No bonus points for saying, Add WMA support!)
• Youre in a boat with a rock, on a fresh-water lake. You throw the rock into the lake. With respect to the land, what happens to the level of the water in the lake goes up, goes down, stays the same?

He posted a couple of answers, but you’ll have to read his post for them.

Apparently, even though Allegiance wasn't a commercial success for Microsoft, the fan base is very loyal. So loyal, in fact, that MS Research has posted the Allegiance source code to the community. I've never played Allegiance (or heard of it, for that matter), but the trailers on the Allegiance home page made it sound pretty cool. Even cooler is that MS couldn't keep working on the game, but didn't want to leave their fans in the lurch, so the released the source. Is this a thousand points of light or what!?! : )