It’s been an age. I do have a good excuse; my wife had a baby so I've been very busy and not thinking about my blog.

Our next Irish Architect Council is on the 20th of October in Dublin, Thoughtworks have kindly offered to speak on agile methods and the council members are excited. Architects are under pressure to deliver things faster and cheaper and maybe Agile is one of the ways of achieving that. We'll find out soon.

I've been investigating mobile solutions, in particular rugged devices. A customer commented that an application written for my Pocket PC was unlikely to stand up to the "Tyranny or the thumbs" for his field technicians. Rugged is great but comes at a price.

Encryption of mobile comms, particularly if you want to use WS still seems difficult so roll on CF 2.0 and WS-Security.

I get asked about customer evidence of local Irish enterprises using .NET all the time. I know plenty of big .NET installations with more on the way. The trouble is that these are not in the public domain - yet. My plan is to get this published over the next few months and get a good cross section of case studies. If you are doing .NET work and think it would make a good case study please let me know.