Sebastien Lambla posts his first Longhorn experiences. Pretty rough, but then it's a very early pre-beta release.

Darrell Norton did his own research into productivity of multiple monitors. His findings are very interesting and is similar to what Microsoft's own research found.

WhatIsNew.com is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the TabletPC.

Marcus Kwan is joining the Aero team here (Aero is the user experience in the next version of Windows). He asked me for my advice (he was being courted by several great companies). I actually downplayed Microsoft in our conversations (I figured he already got enough of my passion about Microsoft on my blog). Told him to follow his heart and work for a team that would enable him to change the world -- I really didn't think we had a chance of getting him to come to Redmond. He's an extremely talented designer. Can't wait to see what he does.

You know, at the PDC, Ray Ozzie came looking for me at dinner one night. Well, it just might be that his prior art claim on his weblog is what got the Eolas case to be looked at by the patent office again (although Google found me several other examples of prior art). Next time I'll buy dinner for Ray.

CNET News.com: Patent office to re-examine Eolas patent. ""A substantial new question of patentability exists with respect to claims 1-3 and 6-8 of the 906 patent in view of prior art acknowledged by the patentee in the 906 patent and the newly cited teachings of Berners-Lee, Raggett I and Raggett II," Kunin wrote."

Rory Blyth writes up his ideas on how to improve his porn collection with WinFS. Oh, boy. Reminds me of the day when "the naked guy" called me with NetMeeting (he really was).

Larry O'Brien: "one well-known aspect of Microsoft betas compared with other industry betas is that they're famously slow compared to the final product."

It's important to note that Longhorn is not even in beta. I don't expect to see a beta of Longhorn until next Summer.

His rant has a second point: that Microsoft has now shown you where and when we'll be doing things. "If you want to work with Microsoft, that's great. If you want to compete with Microsoft, it's even better."

Dana just saw my pointer to Brent Simmons and he called me on that. "Do you really want people to ignore what Microsoft does on UI?" Um, no. But, if you're gonna break the UI rules, do it on purpose and with great thought. Heck, look at our PDC Community App's UI. It doesn't look anything like Microsoft Word. But, do you want all apps to look different? I don't think so. There's a great usability advantage to having apps look and behave consistently. But, there are times for breaking the rules. If you don't know them, don't try and always do usability testing.

Omar Shahine has a NewsGator Plugin for Das Blog.

Juval Lowy on MSDN: introduction to C#'s generics.

For instance, the C# programmable calculator would seriously benefit from Avalon.