Where's Waldo?

  • Article

A few people have asked why I haven't posted recently. I guess it's because I have been busy. Two areas have consumed much of my time.

1. ISV (and VAR/SI) research. I have been compiling the information I have gathered on your platform needs and I have presented my conclusions and recommendations to management.

I want to thank all of those I have personally met along the way, as well as those who have responded to my blog and/or sent me email. If I haven’t responded to your email, assume my junk email filter has filtered you out. You can always post a comment to a blog entry.

The overwhelming areas in which I received feedback were on the following subjects; Application Extensibility (Add-In’s, etc..), Application Deployment, CLR & Framework provisioning, Forms reconciliation, Versioning, and SaaS-SOA-RIA-Smart Client clarity.

Much of what you asked for was clarity (i.e., A roadmap, PAG, etc..) and simplicity. I received a number of questions on the best practice for enabling Add-in’s, Plug-in’s, Add-On’s, etc... Which leads me to the second subject I have been working on.

2. Application Extensibility.

I have taken on a deeper role in this area and I am very pleased with the CLR teams progress on the System.AddIn* model. We have taken the initial implementation I worked on in Visual Studio Tools for Applications, and enhanced the offering beyond the scenarios that would apply to the VSTA customer base. I am very excited about this feature. We have completed (i.e., Code Complete) our known feature work for the Orcas release (i.e., the release after VS 2005)!

We have just completed a draft of the first of two MSDN, “CLR Inside Out” articles, on the System Add-In model. The articles will appear about the same time as the libraries will be available in the Orcas CTP. I will be posting more on the CLR’s System AddIn model in the future.

I also wanted to thank Soma for mentioning the importance of Application Extensibility and referral to my blogs on the subject. For those of you who wish to stay in the know, I would recommend reading Soma’s blog. After all, it was on Soma’s blog that we announced the WinFX renaming.

 

Thanks for your patients. - JackG