Adam Kinney seems to be that rare combination of graphic designer and coder that I want to be to survive in the brave new world of Longhorn. I’m following his blog avidly.

I used to brag that, unlike most C++ programmers, I learned C++ directly from the CFRONT 2.0 release notes and not from Stanley Lippman (his C++ Primer is a key part of C++ canon law). That boast came to a screeching halt when I had Stan in one of my COM courses and he revealed that he’d written the CFRONT 2.0 release notes.

And as if teaching the world C++ wasn’t enough, now that he works at Microsoft on the new Visual C++ and it’s new support for the .NET Framework in “Whidbey,” he’s started a blog to teach the world now only how VC++’s new tracking handle syntax (aka “hat”) but more importantly to point out *why* the VC++ went in this new direction.

And I can’t imagine someone I’d rather learn it from.

Drew Marsh describes the internals of the XAML dotted attribute syntax that I described a few days ago as well as contrasting it with the existing .NET IExtenderProperty model.

Here.

Drew’s documenting what he discovers as he digs into Avalon.

When you can write nearly perfect versions of PacMan and Space Invaders in your favorite productivity application, you know it's crossed the boundary. Of course, treating cells like pixels and implementing the game by changing the background colors probably wasn't what the Excel developers had in mind, but frankly, that's not much different than what the guys writing the original games had to deal with. Wow.

Because of history and laziness, my blog entries come from an HTML form on my site and they’ve always been in plain text. Well, today I got tired of that, so I asked Kent Sharkey (the MSDN King of ASP.NET) what I should get. He recommended the FreeTextBox ASP.NET control and this thing rocks! The Word/FrontPage keystrokes work the way I want them to. The Styles and Fonts and Colors are all provided for in an Office 2003-like toolbar. There’s a spell-checker (that installs on the fly, no less!), raw HTML editing, a table editor and a function that cleans up Word-produced HTML better than FrontPage! Plus it only took me about 30 minutes to get the thing going from a standing start and that included moving a form to use post-back so that I could enable runat=server. The only things I haven’t figured out how to make it do are disable some of the toolbar items, allow tab to take me out of the editor to other controls on my form and set the target on a link, but still, not bad for 30 minutes. : )

Highly Recommended.

Don Box simplified my XAML code using resources and styles. He also illustrates another XAML-ism that I’m coming to love: dotted element names. When you see something a dotted element name in XAML:

<GridPanel>
  <GridPanel.Resources>...</GridPanel.Resources>
  ...
</GridPanel>

what you’re looking at is a more convenient way of specifying an XML attribute using XML element syntax. For example, while you can specify a menu item like s

<MenuItem Header="New" />

However, if you’re doing anything fancy, like specifying an access key, you can do this using the dotted element name syntax:

<MenuItem>
  <MenuItem.Header>
    <FlowPanel>
      <AccessKey Key="N" />
      <SimpleText>ew</SimpleText>
    </FlowPanel>
  </MenuItem.Header>
</MenuItem>

In the first case, we’re just specifying a string, so declaring the Header attribute inline makes sense. In the second case, we’re composing the Header for the MenuItem as a FlowPanel, combining an AccessKey and a SimpleText element. Underneath the covers, XAML attributes translate into properties, so for those properties more complicated than strings, the dotted element name syntax allows properties to be specified as sub-elements.

<this>is a test </this>