I'm starting to shovel some coal into the engine of the Microsoft Forums Client project.  As of this morning you can find my rough draft requirements for the project at the CodePlex site for the project.  I've spent a pretty long time working on the requirements, I know the document itself has some areas that need to be cleaned up and fleshed out, but I believe I've got a pretty solid list of everything a great offline client should have.

What are the next steps?  From here I hope everyone reading will go check out the requirements document and leave your feedback.  Very soon we will be turning those requirements into individual feature items in the project issue tracker for everyone to vote on.  Once we get a good, prioritized, list of features the coding can begin!

Keep in mind that just because a feature shows up in the requirements doesn't mean it's going to make it into release one.  We think it's important to get something with basic functionality, and solid stability, out as fast as we can.  That doesn't mean we' won't try to do as many features as we can, it just means that some things may have to wait for release 2 or release 3.  I also think that given the nature of the project, we'll be able to keep making releases over time, even after the core team is also working on other things.

I'm really excited about this project.  I've spent this week talking to a lot of people at the Microsoft MVP Summit about forms in general and the client app in particular.  I've heard a lot of passionate voices around these things and I'll try and post a good recap of the week once I get through tomorrow.

For anyone who's at the Summit, I'll be at the Communities side session from 2:00 - 5:30 or so on Thursday, May 16, 2008.