I'm done with my part of helping make WinHEC a success. My talk went off pretty well and we got some great questions and comments. I also worked the booth and showed industry and press people what Longhorn can do. The big news for the WinHEC release is that we now have a start to our 3D APIs. We had a couple of examples that show mixing 3D and 2D in a seamless way. I tried to go out of my way to make sure that everyone knew that Avalon was much more than just graphics. We are a full UI platoform that includes controls, styling, databinding, etc.
The main demo I was showing was a simulated "blood sugar tracker." It essentially has a 3D bar graph in the background that slowly rotates. Layered on that are semi-transparent buttons. There is also a details panel that can come up that is semi-transparent and has another 3D scene hosted inside of it. We have a vector graphic doctor icon in the corner that you can zoom in on to see that it is rasterized at the device resolution. The really impressive thing here is that our demo team (a dev and a designer) took 2-3 days to turn this from an email idea into reality. Robert and Nathan did a great job of showing the power of Avalon. Here is a screen shot:
