Because of the lack postings on this weblog, below is a little heads-up on whatever I have been doing recently.

During the second half of 2006 I’ve been fairly busy implementing a “software factory” strategy (whatever that means J) for one of the bigger consultancy companies based in europe. This certainly was a very interesting (and otherwise valuable) experience. Even though I can’t share any internals on this work, I should be able to do a post or 2 on software factories in general (and whatever I think makes sense in this ballgame). Ever since “The software factories book” got published, this has been a very interesting subject for most companies doing software development.
The basic principle is to gain productivity manufacturing software, and from what I’ve seen around (some companies being more successful than others) this promise seems to hold.

At this moment I am involved in the development of Enterprise Library version 3 – As most people in the Enterprise Library community know - Tom Hollander’s blog is probably the best source for news on whatever we are doing (or plan to do) in this release. Also; the Enterprise Library community has moved to its new home at CodePlex– where you can download our first CTP of version 3 and discuss the latest bits in one of the forums.

.NET Configuration Manager development is currently on a hold – My plans to “Configure the world!” have not faded –but because of the dependency of this project on Enterprise Library 2 (of which currently a successor is being developed) and time constraints, I decided to put this project on hold. Apologies for being such a bad host to this community. Eventually I hope this is all for the better, since Enterprise Library 3 should contain new facilities for the community to do this type of development.

Aspect Oriented Programming – As some might know, I am very passionate about Aspect Oriented Programming. Even though this programming technique is rapidly gaining acceptance in the Java communities, Microsoft developers have seldom heard about AOP –or even worse: think of it as being evil. Since I actually share many of the concerns surrounding AOP, I decided to embed my own Aspect Oriented Programming environment into the Visual Studio IDE. This environment aims at having all the bells and whistles Microsoft developers are used to work with and tries to mitigate most of the concerns surrounding AOP. I currently have a fairly stable beta of this environment, that builds on top of this previous proof of concept. More on this will definitely follow!