What is Crossbow ?

Crossbow allows interoperability between windows forms and WPF.
This means you can use the great visual elements from WPF along side the windows forms bits that your used to, hence creating hybrid applications that use the strengths of both technologies.
So you could have a windows form app that loads in some WPF items using xaml etc or a wpf app that loads in a winforms datagridview etc.
It's still in beta but worth checking out to work out how you would be able to integrate into your applications in the future.
Check out this blog for more information http://blogs.msdn.com/mhendersblog/default.aspx

Week 1 @ Home

Been at home for the whole of last week, bub is not due to arrive until the 30th but I'm basically too tired and uncomfortable to be at work all day...not to mention distracted and forgetful :)

So what have I done with my first week off. Pretty much just played a lot of Oblivion on Xbox 360. In fact I played so much that yesterday I had to buy a play and charge kit as my controller was already running out of batteries !

Apart from that I did head on in to the office for a photo shoot, which was very interesting. Spent about three hours posing for photo's in various locations around the office. The people doing the photo's were really nice which meant it wasn't too daunting.

This week I'm going to try and spend a little more time off the Xbox and catch up on a bunch of webcasts and podcasts that I haven't had a chance to listen to yet. As well as catching up on some reading of MSDN magazine and the architecture journal.