I'm back from a brief but fun vacation in Paris and London - away from the distractions of the web and e-mail. But alas I'm back in Seattle now, so I wanted to give a quick update on a few things of note.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming
Yes, the World Cup is over, and we can go back to whatever it was that we were meant to be doing. I'd congratulate Italy on their win, except that I'm still bitter and twisted from the bad referee call that resulted in Italy's last second penalty kick in their second round match against Australia. Much as I love the World Cup, I do think this year's tournament was plagued by bad calls and bad luck that resulted in the better team losing on too many occasions. Still I guess it's all a part of the game.
Smart Client Software Factory is released!
After months of talking about Software Factories and delivering community previews, we've finally delivered our first "v1" release, the Smart Client Software Factory. If you're doing any smart client development with .NET, this is definitely worth a look - and of course let us know what you think on the community site. And remember that the Web Service Software Factory and Mobile Client Software Factory are also available as community previews and are both nearing completion.
New book: Effective Use of Enterprise Library
Lenny Fenster, who is a Microsoft Services consultant and was also one of the developers on the Enterprise Library 2.0, has written a book called Effective Use of Microsoft Enterprise Library which has just been published by Addison-Wesley. Lenny is in the unique position of having both worked on the EntLib development team and having used it extensively on real customer projects, so this book provides some great insight that should be very valuable to Enterprise Library users. Oh, and the book also has a forward by some guy called Tom Hollander. And no, it's not the same guy who's in the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
Olaf strikes again
Olaf Conijn, the p&p Champion award winner famous for his Environmental Overrides plug-in for Enterprise Library, continues his quest for world domination (powered by Enterprise Library) with his new open-source project (hosted on CodePlex) called .NET Configuration Manager. CoMan (as Olaf affectionally calls it) plugs into the Enterprise Library configuration tool to allow GUI-based editing of standard web.config files. And as an incentive for you to get involved, Olaf is giving away $US100 to the person that reports the "most/best issues" using CodePlex's issue tracker tool. If you prefer to win real money than spend hypothetical money, you should definitely get involved.
