I'm currently working on a quite demanding web application (it's a game, but I'm not going to talk specifics) and one of the aspects of this was the requirement to draw filled polygons in the web browser (up to about 300 at a time, not animated). I wrote a JavaScript graphics library which acted as a layer between VML (for IE) and SVG (for Firefox), basically abstracting the 'canvas' model both vector drawing methods support. This was all well and good, but performance was an issue. As I've been a .NET programmer for three years, over my time I've dabbled with .NET 3.0 and XAML, and was surprised to see Microsoft releasing a web browser component that provides cross-browser XAML support; obviously to be in direct competition with Abobe. So, after some fiddling around for a couple of weeks with the WPF/E SDK and being wowed by the CTP demos, I managed to emulate the polygon drawing methods I did in JavaScript. Unfortunately, the performance issues were still there. I wasn't impressed. But, the bottleneck was not WPF/E itself... because these polygons were being dynamically added to the canvas (using CreateFromXaml() in JavaScript) a bit of profiling with lots of 'new Date().valueOf()' shows that this was actually where the performance problems lay. I came to the conclusion that it was the WPF/E <-> JavaScript layer that was causing the delays. Using static XAML as a test made these performance rendering problems disappear... but that wasn't what the application was all about, sadly. So, if you're using WPF/E with say Web Expression (or static XAML), creating animations, cartoons, videos, and basic (really basic) applications in vectors, WPF/E is actually rather good. But trying to be more dynamic and introducing complicated JavaScript into the mix doesn't appear to be doing any favours. Next up Microsoft... give IE a multi-threaded JavaScript engine and hopefully other browsers will follow suit. (This was a bit longer than I planned.. :))

90% of waking hours. Overtime? You don't get that in the games industry.

When I installed RC1 turning on classic view was the first thing I did. To me, it's not really that different from classic view in XP/2003 - of course, Explorer has changed a bit, it has some almost-but-not-quite XP-style buttons on the toolbar, but at least they appear to be in 16 colours :) My system is a four year old P4 2.4, 1GB, and a Radeon 9550 (w/256MB). It runs Aero nicely, despite being a low-spec graphics card, but, all the flashy whiz-bang stuff I turn off through personal preference. I don't have any visual effects enabled in XP on my laptop, for example - over time, I found myself sitting around waiting for menus to fade in... Aero does look very nice indeed - slick presentation, scrolling and fading work really well where used (in almost all occurances, these effects are used to give better visual feedback to the user) - and I'm sure many people will enjoy it, but as someone who uses a computer for ~10 hours a day, it just gets in the way for me.