Avalon preview now on MSDN

This is great news to get the wider developer community interested and working on the next wave of great applications. Note you will need to be an MSDN subscriber to download this preview. For more information visit Tim Sneath's weblog or the Longhorn developer center.

Avalon is the new graphics display subsystem that we announced at PDC, which unified documents, graphics, media and user interfaces into a single platform. Using a new vector-based compositing engine, Avalon takes full advantage of modern graphics hardware and provides the capabilities for building rich, immersive applications with 2D and 3D capabilities. Avalon also introduces XAML, a markup language that maps XML markup to objects in the .NET Framework and is built to allow designers and developers to work together in the user interface development process.

Originally a Longhorn-only feature, the Avalon team has been working over the last couple of months to additionally support current releases of the Windows operating system. The fruits of that work are now visible in the form of this preview release, which runs on Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003. You'll need .NET Framework 2.0 installed on your machine, and ideally a DirectX 9-class graphics adapter(although Avalon has a software fallback for older cards).