As many of you know, building a new system while you're running the current one is a challenge and a half, but that's exactly what we're trying to do with MSDN.  Our current infrastructure is pretty moldy, and we knew that it didn't make a lot of sense to continue to try to build on top of it.  So, several months ago, we spun up an effort to build the new infrastructure. 

I told the team to go away, put their heads down, and focus on getting the basic infrastructure up and running.  We could cover the breadth cases later; we all felt that it was important to get the basic infrastructure and architecture in place first.

Last week, I got together with the team to walk through what they'd done so far.  Clean design, very extensible, XML and SQL Server at the core.  I saw the UI that'll let our publishing team streamline the publishing process.  It's all very early; it'll still be quite a while before we can run all of MSDN on it.  But it was progress pure and simple.  And that's a beautiful thing. :-)