Kevin Daly

I take my first steps with the May Avalon/Indigo Beta 1 RC

It's good to have a version at last that works with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 - apart from the benefits of at least one element of the development setup being relatively stable and robust, it was horribly confusing maintaining different test environments with different versions of the tools.
It's also encouraging to see the spookily-independant-pillars-of-Longhorn (good name for a band, that) inching towards Beta: not only is that encouraging from the point of view of wanting these things to actually see daylight one day rather than lingering on forever in a CTP half-world (in which case Microsoft would have to be renamed Mordorsoft), but it also gives cause to hope that the day might not be far off when things like styling and binding syntax are not drastically refactored every couple of months.

That day has of course not yet come :-)
It goes without saying that I have a lot of catching up to do.
I thoroughly recommend Tim Sneath's article A Hitchhiker's Guide to Avalon Beta 1 RC (original link via Lauren Lavoie's blog) - it's an excellent introduction to some of the changes and especially new features in this release, with clear and relevant examples. Microsoft documentation writers please read and learn One of the features Tim introduces is support for speech (both recognition and synthesis), provided the speech APIs are installed on the machine (which is one reason I'm pleased that I'm using a Tablet PC as my Avalon/Indigo/WinFX test machine). I tried the synthesis side last night and I'm pleased to report that it not only works, but it's as easy to use as it should be. It took me a little while to hunt down the necessary reference (it was cunningly hidden as er, Speech. How was I to know?), but after that it was laughably simple.
Visual Studio was alarmingly sluggish at returning to normal after running a speech app in debug, but I'm not sure how much of that is the SDK integration and how much has to do with the speech engine (I assume there's a lot of interop going on).

I'm still not sure what to make of the new project type, Avalon “Express“ applications. Apparently these are effectively ClickOnce for Avalon, and are tightly sandboxed. The sticking point for me is that they will not be able to use Indigo, which seems to limit their usefulness for data-driven applications. They can however call ASMX web services: that in itself might keep ASMX alive long after it might otherwise be regarded as having been rendered obsolete by Indigo. Actually, I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that the bit about not being able to use Indigo may need to be qualified, since while I have not tried Indigo (yeah, it's on the list) I assume that it is possible to produce an Indigo service which in its relations with the outside world does not differ in any significant respect from an ASMX web service.

Now time to get my head around all the changes...