Catching Up

Today was my last day on the extended Intuit contract.  Now I’m off to find the next great team to work with.  If anyone has projects that can be outsourced or new contracts, I’m looking.

I worked with a really great team at Intuit since February to build some features in their web sites, improve some windows services and processes, and create a few interesting web services.  All of the work entailed features and improvements to the high volume credit card transaction system.  The last two projects were the most fun.  The most recent was a WCF-based API that will be publicly available to all Intuit merchants.  The project before that was a WCF-based credit card validation service that will be available to every TurboTax 2010 installation.  I’ve had a great time with Intuit's IMS team.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’ve been working on a commercial Silverlight-RIA Service project and my own long-term WPF project.  I worked for many hours this week to get more comfortable in Expression Blend 3.0.  It’s awkward for an avid Visual Studio user like me but worth the initial hurdle.  I've been very comfortable in Microsoft tools since Visual C++ 1.0 beta.  Expression Blend has so many hidden features that it's still going to take a while to get proficient.

Tonight I’m working on the new Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Packaging feature to more easily create and install a web site and database.  There’s always something to do with today's technology.

Caught Up,
-Vince