• Miles Platform

  • Active Directory FOAF Gateway – internal beta
  • Active Directory Photo Uploader – internal beta
  • MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) service / client – idea
  • Internal Library service / client – prototype

• WCF related

  • ChunkingChannelEx – bug fixing
  • XMPP Transport Channel – research/inception stage.
  • WCF Test Client Extended!

• Miscellaneous

  • Agressive – Silverlight-based, lightweight Time Management System – planning/prototyping stage.
  • Visual Studio Theme Explorer – planning phase.
  • Tinyject – A tiny IoC/DI container in about 200 lines of C#.

The idea is to release as many of these under a liberal open license – probably hosted on CodePlex or a similar service.

The most annoying “feature” (it was really bad a couple of weeks ago) is that you have to re-login quite often – even though you have selected “save LiveID and password” on the login page. As far as I know, they have fixed this on the new forum site, http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/ . Other quirks is that the post editor is really buggy in Firefox – if you want to insert a hyperlink, add a code sample or change the text color etc. the whole page will scroll to the top when you click the given button in the editor. All the text you have entered in the text area can also disappear if the underlying JavaScript logic is in a bad mood.

Well, that was a short rant about the some of the shortcomings of the existing forum site, where the WCF forum currently reside. They will hopefully migrate it *very soon now* .

The new forum site looks promising – a bit Web2.0ish with features like auto-update when new things are posted etc.

Since I’m anticipating the new forum, I came to think of a nice-to-have tool that I have looked for before; an offline client (like a NNTP news reader) for the MSDN Forum. Last time I checked, there was none, but a quick search now revealed a relatively new CodePlex project; MSDN Forums Client.

It is still in the planning phase, so the only releases available on the project site is document describing the project scope and a draft for the requirements document. I’ve read through the documents, and the first thing that strikes me is the resemblance of Outlook Express / Windows Mail (something that I notice other people have mentioned on the front-page discussion as well).

Even tough I like the idea of an open project with available source code on CodePlex, why don’t they rather extend their existing NNTP client ( a.k.a. a part of the functionality in O.E / W.M) with some forum-specific functionality?

There hasn’t been any activity on the project since April, so for now, I think I’m adding the project’s news feed to my blog roll and wait for some real action / CTP / source code.