After spending billions on Longhorn, Marc LeFleur is still playing Solitaire. Alright, who's gonna rewrite Solitare as a .NET app that exploits Avalon? Oh, one of the comments on Marc's site says Chris Sells is working on one.

This is painful stuff. Don Box and Chris Anderson sing Christmas songs after teaching us about XAML. (The songs start at about minute 15). You've been warned. Christmas will never be the same for me now.

If you don't follow the news, you might not know that Real Networks sued Microsoft today in a California court.

Here's some links:

1) News.com's article.

2) InternetNews.com's article.

3) eWeek's article.

4) Microsoft Monitor's analysis.

5) Seattle PI's coverage on Todd Bishop's blog about Microsoft. He has pointers to the actual suit and Microsoft's official response. "It’s hard to reconcile Real’s own statements on their market success with today’s lawsuit."

Wallmart is selling music for $.88 a song.

Stefan Tilkov: "I honestly believe that people like Dare do a lot more to make others appreciate Microsoft than those [link to Scoble] who appear brainwashed."

OSX/Panther Fans: update and security fixes ahead, CNET says.

Tablet Fans, here's a cool Calculator: xThink.

Some friends (all MVPs, most focused on Windows development) are visiting the Microsoft campus in April and I wanna give them the red carpet treatment. If you were visiting the campus, what would you like to see? (Other than Bill Gates' office)

I have a list of things I've seen already that are pretty good.

1) Windows Build Lab and War Room tour.
2) Microsoft Home of the Future tour.
3) Company Store and Museum.
4) Art Tour.
5) Game Development Lab Tour.

Are there other tours that my fellow employees know about that would be good to take developers through?

James Robertson says I'm hurting Visual Studio's marketing by using Notepad as I learn C# (oh, and I'm still playing with VB too -- I'm still not sure I want to worry about curly braces and camel case).

I say that's bull.

I'm learning to program. Not learning to use Visual Studio. I wanna know how to branch my code. How to properly call objects. Send around strings. How to write algorithms.

Why would I want to do that in Visual Studio when I'm a beginner? To tell you the truth, I also am playing with Visual Studio as I work through the books that I'm working with. Why? Cause I wanna see what the experience is like in both places. But, Visual Studio is an awfully confusing place to be for a beginner. Tons of icons. Debuggers. Properties. Options. What again do those have with writing a loop or dealing with strings?

Once I learn how to program by hand, then I can see that Visual Studio will make me much more productive. Code-completion rocks! I love how Visual Studio puts the curly braces and indentations in the right places too.

One other thing: the books I'm reading all want you to focus on the concepts. They don't want you to be in an editor. An editor isn't needed at the early stages of learning to program. And if saying that hurts Visual Studio's marketing, then tough.

Doc Searls covers how to do a good presentation, even if you use PowerPoint. "It's the story stupid."