Ok look, I’m not exactly thrilled with the fact that WinFS might not see the light of day until ~2010 either. I’ve been looking forward to the point where rich forms of data are managed by the OS for quite some time. Imagine being able to ship a product where you don’t need to install a custom database […]

I seem to remember thinking Indigo was one of the most complete pillars of Longhorn when I walked out of the PDC 2003, where as Avalon had a lot more work to go. Since then I think I believe I recall reading that they were taking some Indigo pieces back to the drawing board, but… it’s […]

I just noticed I can’t find any documentation on ServiceManager, IScopedService, etc. in the WinFX SDK. It looks like all the Annotation Framework classes are all marked as obsolete as well. I thought the Annotation Services were an awesome idea. John Developer can just add this feature to his application with very little work on his end. Not only that, […]

Someone asked a good question in the WinFx newsgroups about how to go from a the result of a hit test (via UIElement::InputHitTest) to a Button. Now InputHitTest returns IInputElement which you can then cast to FrameworkElement. At first you might think you can just walk up the logical tree from there using FrameworkElement::Parent until you run into the […]

It would seem that the latest drop of Avalon is still missing the concept of a “VisualBrush”. A VisualBrush would be used to paint other surfaces with any other visual definition. An example would be painting a <Canvas>’s contents onto a 3D surface. Not only that but I should still be able to interact with that set of visuals […]

This is really not a huge deal, but I was surprised to see that this latest drop still uses the “Definition” namespace URI. I know there was some discussion about this even at the PDC when Avalon was unveiled, being that it’s not exactly the greatest URI on the face of the Earth. I realize […]