Okay, I'll admit it...my definition of shortly sucks. Ten months between blog posts was very much not what I intended. All I can say is I got pulled into a couple of CAB projects for another bank which have sucked up all my time, but things have calmed down a bit and I hope to post a little more regularly now (yeah yeah, I know).

So what momentous event caused me to start blogging again?  The announcement by Tim Sneath that .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 is on the horizon, including the third major release of WPF.  What's more the long missed DataGrid control is making a WPF comeback in an out-of-band release.  This should make WPF a much more attractive proposition to those creating business applications; should certainly make the reams of data-binding code I've written to cope with WinForms limitations redundant.

An interesting point a customer made to me the other day was that there's no clear guidance on where we've been, are or where we're going with smart client technologies. A lot of phrases, acronyms and codenames get bandied about without a coherent view of how they all fit together, which can be confusing for someone who's coming to it all new, especially when explaining the benefits this technology can bring to non-technical people. I'm going to have a shot at bringing it together in some sort of simple top-level diagram, so watch this space.