Update

This blog seriously needs some updating! As usual there are the standard excuses, i.e., stuff going on at work, milestones, thinking about new things, and the sorts.

Things have indeed been pretty busy at work. We recently wrapped up a long coding milestone (actually very long - almost 6 months if I can even keep track) for IIS7. As mentioned here, I've been focusing on IIS side of things for the past year or so. There is a lot of cool stuff coming down the pipe indeed. Rather than enumerating it all, check out Cory Isakson's pretty detailed log of Day 1 and Day 2 of the on-going IIS7 devlabs.

Now that this milestone is complete, I am starting to switch my focus back on ASP.NET side of the house, to do some thinking about v-next. I like to think of my last week was sort of my very own think-week where I was prototyping some workflow scenarios for ASP.NET while working away from the office.

At the same time, it is also interesting to think of next steps, new capabilities etc. for Web development in general. I think we've done some really cool new things in Whidbey such as declarative data-binding, and callbacks (which should enable AJAX-like scenarios using ASP.NET controls as shown by Bertrand over on his blog). Good first steps and I am looking forward to the new slew of controls people build with all the new features now available. I think we can go much farther both in terms of making things declarative, smarter and richer visually and functionally (both in terms of developer experience and end-user experience). Pretty exciting, and stuff I've wanted to get into personally for over a while now! I'd love to hear what you are looking for from ASP.NET to enable one to really really up the caliber of application experiences. More as thoughts turn into something concrete.

On the side, I've been dabbling with DirectX just a bit. I have some ideas around some multimedia software. After experimenting for a month, I at least have some basic ideas about what it means to develop with Direct3D and things like pixel and vertex shaders. I have probably never felt so clueless and so much of a newbie before, but now with some initial experience, its just starting to get interesting. Of course this means still more native code programming! Its not so bad :-)