MSDN goodies
MSDN
So we finally got our MSDN universal subscription material and it's got a ton of good stuff. I'm kind of stoked about getting to play with the new Exchange.net beta. Mainly I want to check out it's integration with .Net, see if it has a decent .Net API and also check out it's Instant Messaging features. I forsee IM taking off in a big way within the next 5 years and as a component maker/vendor this means a lot to me. It's really not far from Email as I see it, although the protocols differ it still is messaging and the same networking fundamentals apply to both.
My Open Source Future
This weekend I am going to take some time to fix the remaining bugs in OpenSmtp.net. After this release I doubt there will be many features added. Most of my time is going toward releasing a commercial variant of the product, other projects, and contracting. I have plans to release another open source project given all the satisfaction I've gotten from this one. I've been throwing around a few ideas in my head. One of them is a blogging component/application to handle RSS feeds within other applications. It's mainly to work some of the architecture lesssons I've learned over the years into one application. I don't want to over-engineer it for the sake of example but I do want it to be more flexible than OpenSmtp.net was (which caused a few major refactoring sessions). I really would like to focus on the persistance side of the blog/wiki equation and use some of Fowler's EA patterns where needed.
Ruby
I've been playing with Ruby over the last week. It started when I was walking through a local computer show looking for parts and came across an Oreilly's Ruby book for 70% off! I couldn't resist and bought it. What I've found so far is quite nice. It seems to be a nice scripting environment/language with an OOP personality. One of the reasons I bought the book was the simple syntax. But this is still the honeymoon; I'll let you know once that's over ;-)