New Avalon developer preview released

Chris Anderson's blog has been going nuts. I think he's done more postings in the past 48 hours than in the past 48 days. He's an architect on the Avalon team and on Friday he announced that Avalon has shipped a new developer preview to MSDN subscribers.

I've seen several demos of this and it will change development on Windows -- it especially makes building great-looking managed-code applications far easier than before. Before I worked at Microsoft I saw a early demo of Longhorn and most of what I saw was really Avalon. Now Avalon is going to ship on Windows XP, Windows 2003, AND Longhorn. That makes it a much more interesting development platform.

Sounds great. But Scoble, your profile has caught the same bug as Charles' profile used to have, he must have only been able to fix the bug on his profile by putting it on yours.

It's Channel 9's duty to get use some video of the new Avalon on here ASAP!

HOOAH... i can't wait to download it and try it a little...

Hey... BUT... either i start write some code and get some skills on it... i can't write a "real-world-business" application on it until Longhorn is released, or am i wrong? So it just doesn't come out with the VS2005, right?

That will hard to teach to my CEO... i can hear he shouting in my ears: "man! stop loosing your time on this s**t! you have to be productive NOW!"

What i'll say is that: yes that's really great but, in the best prediction, we'll use this holy new dev-platform in 2006/7... that's really frustration ;-(.

Anyway, hip hip hurra to MS. Thanks to let us loosing our time use this fantastic things .

ezu wrote:

HOOAH... i can't wait to download it and try it a little...

Hey... BUT... either i start write some code and get some skills on it... i can't write a "real-world-business" application on it until Longhorn is released, or am i wrong? So it just doesn't come out with the VS2005, right?

That will hard to teach to my CEO... i can hear he shouting in my ears: "man! stop loosing your time on this s**t! you have to be productive NOW!"

What i'll say is that: yes that's really great but, in the best prediction, we'll use this holy new dev-platform in 2006/7... that's really frustration ;-(.

Anyway, hip hip hurra to MS. Thanks to let us loosing our time use this fantastic things .

It's beta'd here on XP in 2004. We'll probably see it released before Longhorn, unless a marketing genius says they should both be released at once.

If I were Microsoft, which (somehow) I'm not, I'd release the final build of Avalon sometime next year, giving people a full year to write apps for "XP only", which then becomes "longhorn only", or roughly 500M PC's by the end of the decade.

Since I don't have a spare box and can't afford any, I guess I"ll have to create a virtual PC image.

But, does anyone have any ideas on "what" to try out on preview version to take advantage of the features? What does a little winform developer like myself have to gain from this? I'd love to be "wowed", and will spend time on it, but I don't even have a first place to start..

Looks great! are there any estimated release dates of this for XP so that we can all have a play!

Come on stop teasing us

Thanks.. But, now, I don't see it on the MSDN Subscription website... Is it out yet? I assume it's open to Universal Subscribers.

Not seeing it in my tree on the left. If anyone has success in downloading it, please let me know.

-J

I found it.. Grr...

MisterDonut wrote:

Since I don't have a spare box and can't afford any, I guess I"ll have to create a virtual PC image.

Yeh, what is up with all these "don't install on machines you need to work" warnings? The VS2005 betas say this as well AFAIR. Does MS have no faith in XP's Restore Point facility or is this just a disclaimer?

All niners should be able to download the Avalon developer preview, as a christmas present or something like that  

rhm wrote:

Yeh, what is up with all these "don't install on machines you need to work" warnings? The VS2005 betas say this as well AFAIR. Does MS have no faith in XP's Restore Point facility or is this just a disclaimer?

System Restore is a bit drastic on a development machine. It has an annoying habit of "restoring" exe's and dll's under development to their "working" state.

MSFT's warning basically amounts to "Don't install this on a machine if you can't afford the time to fix it if it breaks" which is pretty sound advice for all software, let alone beta stuff.

fdezjose wrote:

All niners should be able to download the Avalon developer preview, as a christmas present or something like that  

• Be a Registered Member of the Microsoft Partner Program .
• Submit the URL of your company’s official website at the time of enrollment, using the online enrollment tool. Maintenance of the contact information on the official corporate website is required during the membership.
• Commit to developing one (1) packaged and resalable software application that supports at least one of the following Microsoft technologies:
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003
  • Microsoft Windows XP
  • Microsoft Windows 2000
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2000
  • Microsoft Mobility platform (Microsoft Windows Mobile software for Pocket PCs, Microsoft Windows Mobile software for Smartphones)
• Execute the Initiative Agreement located in the online enrollment tool.
• Pay the annual membership fee of US$375 (fee varies from country to country).

ho ho ho

* in the future - why bother posting msdn stuff releases on Channel 9 where MANY do not have access to get them..  salt in the wounds

( eric rudder, HELP!)

rhm wrote:

Yeh, what is up with all these "don't install on machines you need to work" warnings? The VS2005 betas say this as well AFAIR. Does MS have no faith in XP's Restore Point facility or is this just a disclaimer?

Microsoft cannot guarantee anything with beta products. It's just a disclaimer MS (and most other software companies too) puts on all their beta products, just to make sure you understand that if you install it and your harddisk crashes as a result, you can't blaim them.

It's part of American culture I guess, disclaimers for everything so you don't get sued. I've even seen an air conditioner that had a warning "don't throw air conditioner out of window."

I typically use a separate partition to dual-boot a second Windows installation to test beta stuff. It still won't help me if it crashes my harddisk (which isn't actually all that likely, fortunately) but at least if it screws up Windows I'll be fine.