I’ve been getting into Avalon and a few of the Longhornish technologies lately, but this week was the first chance I had to install the Avalon CTP on my machine and give it a test drive. It looks like things are coming a long nicely and I am specifically looking at things that are easy in Longhorn but hard today in Windows Forms.

Anyway, more on that later. One of the initial hurdles I had to get over was the mysterious black window effect. Its a good thing that I read the release notes - especially for CTP drops. If you run your shell using anything but the default Windows XP blue theme you get a blank black window. This is obviously one of those adorable bugs that you can expect with software so early in its development phase.

For the record guys, I use the Energy Blue theme with the Royale colour scheme – if you could fix that up for the next version that’d be just swell