Back to the land of the living

Well, it's been a few months. I haven't forgotten you guys! Just been busy. Here's a recap:

August
Mark and I spent the end of August wrapping up work on CMS v2 (the internal Content Management System that coordinates everything that goes into the Vista SDK). The front end was finished pretty much on time, while the back end (based on Windows Workflow Foundation) ran a little long.

September
A lot of testing on the front end, while work on the back end wrapped up. Mid-to-late-September a new PM was assigned to manage the project (Barry). CMS v2 was put on hold while he talked with various contributors and users of CMS v1, and created new specs for the work we'd already done.

October
Barry continued working with our users, and started to add new features to the specs, based on that feedback. Most of these will be required before we roll out (now slated for November). There's some tension that's been forming here; I'll think about exploring those dynamics in another post. Or not. :P

The Windows DDK group started talking with our group; they'd like to leverage CMS, as they currently don't have an integrated workflow/change tracking system. We setup a server for them to bang on to see how CMS works and determine if they want to use it. Not only would it be cool to have my work be used by more than just this team, cross-group collaboration is an important review goal within Microsoft. :)

Since August was spent testing the front end as much as possible, I've spent October looking into Windows Presentation Foundation. I'm going to be working on a Breadcrumb Bar sample, as well as possibly a Windows client to CMS (v1 and v2 were implemented in ASP.Net). I have to admit that creating properly databound applications in WPF/Avalon/XAML has been... challenging. I'll post more about that later.

In my spare time I've been picking up VSIP and XNA. I tell you, there just isn't enough time in the day to play with all these cool technologies.

And now we're up to date!