Before I get to a .NET-related post, I thought I would make a visit to the confessional. No fear - we're not voting anyone off the island...but I do have a confession to make (but it's something that you probably already know) -- this blog has been quiet over the past couple weeks. I have a couple blog posts in the pipeline, but I thought I would drop some context around the pause.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Seattle area, western Washington in the summer is just pure magic. I know that it may be hard to believe - given the reputation Seattle has - but between the months of June and September, the skies clear and the mountains come out to play. When one isn't cranking out code during these glorious months, it's a time for biking, hiking, and enjoying the outdoors.

For our part, my wife and I struck out to British Columbia to see Whistler and Blackcomb - we enjoyed the mountain off-season and did some bear-watching. It was nice being able to walk about and do some mountain biking at the lower parts of the mountains, and have the option of doing some snowboarding on the still-snowy top of Blackcomb. The picture attached to this post was of the river that flows through the village at the bottom of the mountains - a river I was told the river was being fed by melting snow.

"Great story and an excellent photo of water," you say; "but what does this all have to do with WF/WCF?", you ask.  Well, the weather and the July 4th holiday weekend means that folks on various teams have been taking a couple days off here and there to enjoy the summer sunshine - which means that publication processes that usually move within a 2 day period have had a lot of delay steps placed in the middle of them. :)

That being said, there's some good things afoot for the coming months:

• We have some good technical content that's going to be going live this week on the MSDN site.
• There's also some library clean-up being done with the posts that have been languishing in the Windows Vista branch of the library (much of it was posted there when this was all still WinFX).
• I've been beta testing some new publication tools for the MSDN web site, which should make creating new pages much simpler. We're going to try and get a couple new pages posted under the WF Dev Center and WCF Dev Center. Our current thoughts are to start tying to collect the video screencasts/how-to's and the code samples together, to help with find-ability.
• I'm trying to convince some of the folks that have signed up to blog to at least pop on and do an introduction, to at least get past their first posts.

I look forward to sharing more details on information as the stuff moves up from staging to production this week; and I hope everyone is having a good summer (for whom this is summer - for those who it is winter, I hope you're enjoying the slopes!) and enjoying yourself.

Your buddy in .NET-Connectedness,
Cliff Simpkins