I'm sure there was nothing they could possibly have done to prevent that.

Cider (MSDN TV demo here) is the visual designer for the Windows Presentation Foundation (used to be Avalon), part of WinFX, and it was just released for the first time as part of the WinFX December 2005 CTP.

It works just fine in VS 2005 RTM, which is how I tried it. My impressions are:

• It has a lot of bugs. They are everywhere, but that's to be expected.
• It can nevertheless do some serious work for you if you want to create XAML - certainly much faster than writing the XML yourself.
• It provides a quick and easy look at some of the controls that are in WPF. Without the visual designer, these could only be found by reading docs.
• It shows off some of the fantastic functionality in WPF, like the fact that UIs are resolution independent. Just drag the zoom slider in the designer pane and see your UI being resized live!
  

In case you haven't heard, WinFS is the new relational file system for Windows. Read the blurb on the official page, I'm not going to repeat that here. Now, is that a good thing?

Reading the SDK docs for the current beta 1 refresh, one might think the authors are mainly promoting the use of more relational database technology (and spreading false information such as that the SQL keyword used to select relationally linked data is UNION), but obviously WinFS is a lot more than that, with its sophisticated system integration, schematised storage of arbitrary information, search, sharing and synchronisation facilities. So yes, I think it's a good thing, generally.

The one thing that's going to decide if WinFS is going to fly or not, is whether mainstream applications will include support for it. It will be available for Windows XP as well as Vista, so operating system support shouldn't be too great a problem (I hope, there are always astonishingly many people who don't even use the second-latest Windows version yet), but application support is much more important than that. Obviously, Outlook 12 will support it out of the box. It will, right?

For you Germans among my readers, it might be interesting to know that the last and the current edition of the dot.net magazin have articles written by me - a workshop article about the rubberband project in the 12/05 edition and a test of Developer Express XtraPivotGrid in the 01/02/06 edition.

There's also something upcoming about Developer Express Refactor!, but I'm not sure in which issue it will appear.

GAT (the Guidance Automation Toolkit) is an interesting package that allows you to easily create VS extensions, wizards, template engines and similar things, without going through all the hassle that the Visual Studio SDK (used to be VSIP) still involves. The new Dec 2005 CTP runs on VS 2005 RTM, which makes the whole thing much more useful. They have also updated the templating engine, so it's now the same as in the current DSL tools CTP.