It's been a busy week, with little time to blog as much as I wished; so I must be getting used to blogging. I thought I'd just catch up right now with an end of the week recap. Coming back our blogging service here, I've found out a bit more about how the service has been setup and the bad news is no pictures for the time being and also no ability to abstract blogs (for the long blogs); it's a technical 'thing'. I'm also starting to try a new Shared Source Word add-in called TonesNotes, to post blogs from within Word. I'll report on that one later. 

On Friday we released some more public information about the road to Longhorn. The news is we are targeting broad availability of the Longhorn “client” OS in 2006 and the Longhorn server in 2007.  We also announced we will make key elements of the Windows WinFX API developer platform that Longhorn provides also available for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. In addition, we'll deliver the new presentation subsystem “Avalon” and the new communication subsystem “Indigo” to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

Earlier in the week I sent an email to a few people in UN/CEFACT telling them we won't be going to more meetings. Actually we only had 2 people at CEFACT and for the last months Jim & I have not had any contact with CEFACT. We've also not even gone to any US Tag meetings a few months. We have though been working on some ISO Open Standards, which CEFACT references. Well my email went to a few CEFACT people, and someone on their list passed it outside to the New York Times and within minutes I was getting messages of a NYT reporter sniffing around. Unfortunately the reporter completely missed any real story on the UN, if there really ever was 'news' which I doubt. If you want to know more on how the NYT got the story wrong, check out Klaus's blog.

As for UN/CEFACT, I'll miss some of their meetings (especially the evening dinners) and a lot of the great people from around the world like Kenji from Japan and ... CEFACT has a lot of work ahead to do but I have all the confidence that the UN staff will get their house in order in due course. Also I'm happy to see CEFACT recently upped its committment to Trade Facilitation, which seems a natural role for the UN and CEFACT. But after this week's NYT paparazzi, it seemed to me that the NYT reporter (and probably others) can't seem to tell the difference between Open Standards and Open Source; which if your developing any new technology you'll probably want to be a little more aware of.

That takes me to my final topic of this weeks recap. I've written an article on the differences between Open Standards and Open Source, which I'll post in a few installments here (it's a long one) and the full article will also go up on the new MSDN Architectural Center site; right after the new site layout is done.

Stay tuned.