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 […]

Chris Sells continues his Avalon based solitaire application by delving deeper into the databinding architecture of Avalon. My favorite part of the sample is his use of data transformers. They’re really powerful because you can basically bind to any type of data, stick the transformer in the middle and let it interpret it how ever it likes… even […]

Rob Relyea has posted a few tidbits on syntax changes we can expect in the next drop of XAML. I especially like the disconnection of resources, which are too closely tied to Avalon in current drops. I also loved the little jab that Rob makes at knockoff technologies about holding off on announcing the new syntax […]