Our PDC 2005 site has more information about the upcoming event at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The event runs from September 13th through the 16th with pre-conferences on the 11th and 12th. I work on the team that puts together this conference, and based on what we're planning, this is going to be an awesome event.

In addition to the track summaries, we've posted the all-important budgeting information. So, if you consider yourself a top-tier architect or developer, or if you just want to see where we're going with all of the cool stuff we're building, don't forget to add $1,695 (the Early Bird price) to your training budget. In my admittedly biased opinion, if you only attend one Microsoft event over two years, it better be this one. Oh...and I'll see you there!

Channel 9 strikes again! They cornered Chris Anderson for an 11-minute video interview where Chris talks about the architecture of Avalon, including such juicy bits as:

• Where Direct3D and User32 fit into the picture
• What the heck is MILCORE.DLL?
• The diagram-busting features in PresentationCore.DLL and PresentationFramework.DLL
• And an introduction to the UI and composition threads (or, Why I Don't Have to Worry Much About Composition)

He briefly mentions Rory Blyth's post about a new version of Notepad. Scandalous!

I organized and ran my first developer lab at our Platform Adoption Center (otherwise known as building 20) in early March. We had quite a few component vendors in attendance. Our work was focused on helping the vendors ensure that their components are compatible with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2, and we had a number of product team members there to help. The guys from Channel 9 were kind enough to visit, and they shot some short video segments:

• Daniel Jebarat, Vice President of Syncfusion (authors of the fantastic Windows Forms FAQ) shows off some of their controls in a 12-minute video, including their Essential Grid, Essential Chart, Essential Diagram, and a fully managed C# HTML rendering engine called Essential HTMLUI.
• Michael J. Baldwin, President of Dart Communications, is interviewed in a 16-minute video where he talks about the technology behind their PowerWEB Live Controls for ASP.NET. If you're familiar with AJAX, this technology achieves the same results.
• Stephen Dadoly and Tony Lombardo of Infragistics talk about how their WebGrid uses asynchronous callbacks to load and display only the data you need in their 10-minute video. They also talk about some of the new features of Visual Studio 2005, including editable regions in the designer and the ability to embed JavaScript and image resouces in their controls.
• There's also a 9-minute video with Raghavendra Prabhu where he talks about the Windows Forms designer. Interesting stuff.

Developer labs are great resources for not only our customers and partners, but also for us. Because lab attendees work side-by-side with the people building our products, we get extremely valuable feedback that can be incorporated into our products. This is just one of the many ways we validate that our technology can be used in very real-world scenarios.

Adam Nathan's Win32 to WinFX Blog has a good post titled XAML Playing Cards. Adam takes the playing cards from Windows XP and updates them to run on the March CTP of Avalon. As you can see in his screen shots, because the Avalon cards are rendered using vectors, they retain their fidelity even at very high zoom levels. Best of all, he includes the source code for experimentation.