Dead or alive, you're coming with me
Just a short post today (actually, now that it's finished it's pretty long but there's no much technical content here) as I'm shuffling things around schedule wise and just wanted to let you know where things are. This also talks about some dead projects that are being resurrected and others that are being reborn. Yeah, I'm all about software reincarnation.
First up is scheduling for the SharePoint Forums Web Part. Releases are going to be the first Monday of each month so if the first is a Tuesday, it shuffles ahead to the next week (the 6th of the month). Yeah, I could choose the day before but then it wouldn't give me those extra few days so cut me some slack. The next release of the forums is 1.3 (it was called 2.0 but it hasn't got that mature yet) and will work in WSS ASP.NET 2.0 setups and implement various bug fixes and new features. The 2.0 release will be the one that fully leverages MOSS 2007 as there are some major changes to architecture and the deployment (it will be a solution deployment rather than an MSI, and available as a feature you can turn on or off). That is expected to come along in the September drop.
The SharePoint Knowledgebase release will be the middle of each month (even with a vast team of coding monkeys, I can only get so much done on the 1st of any given month) and the first release has been pushed out the middle of September. I was going to have a release for August, but there's just too much going on where I'll be incognito (i.e. without 'puter) that I can't spin it. The first release will be pretty close to fully featured as there's only so much a knowledge base can do, however please post your ideas in the forums (there hasn't been much activity there) and let me know what you want to see (or confirm that it's there).
As for dead or resurrected projects, there are two. First is the highly anticipated (based on emails I get) SharePoint Builder. This is my visual Xml editor for ONET.XML and SCHEMA.XML files. Yes, it's still alive and kicking however while I was waiting for a stable release of MOSS, other things stacked up so it got shuffled to the back burner. It's back and you'll be hearing from it soon. It's now using the Smart Client Software Factory from Microsoft and has a lot of great features (like remote editing of XML files) and will have full support for MOSS 2007 (while maintaining compatibility with 2003 site definitions). Watch for it in the Sept-Oct timeframe and new screenshots/news in the coming weeks.
The final project is one that hurts me, but makes sense. A couple of months ago I launched my SharePointForge site. Basically a project hosting site for SharePoint projects. The problem was that I had my fingers in too many cookie jars so I couldn't dedicate the time I wanted to the site. CodePlex came and is providing a good place for hosting projects (strangely enough SharePointForge basically looked like CodePlex but on steroids, even before I had seen CodePlex) and really I wasn't able to get into the business of hosting peoples source code. So SharePointForge is dead (sort of) and is being reborn. Like the Phoenix, it's transmogrifying into a new site. It's much like the old SharePointForge concept, but won't offer hosting. I can't announce what this is about, but you'll be hearing and seeing the site in the next couple of weeks.
Most of the shuffle is due to a vacation I'm taking (gasp, horror of horrors). As a consultant, it's actually hard to take a vacation because a) you don't get paid for it and b) you're always thinking about the next project you're working on and trying to squeeze that into some insane schedule (at least I am).
Anyways, Bil is a busy boy but life is good so enjoy it.