I know that I'm no longer untainted because I work in the big house, but I just don’t get this. Do developers really want to build the same thing over and over, project to project, app to app or do they want to spend their time building cool, new stuff? Is .NET or Whidbey or Longhorn any different from continuing the foundation that we've built before? Does anyone really miss building their own file system or declarative content flow or toolbar? Will anyone miss building their own animation, object serialization or secure communications framework? I mean, building these infrastructure pieces is fun, but even more fun is pulling these pieces together to build something that’s never been built before.

Jeremy Mazner has posted another in his series of compelling WinFS scenarios. Personally, this is one of my favorite, simply because it talks about the massive developer benefits of having an object-based stored built into the OS.

The slides from the European tour showing off Longhorn are available on codezone.info. The usual topics are covered, i.e. Avalon, Indigo, WinFS, as well as an overview of Whidbey and a keynote from David Chappell on the foundations of creativity. I wish the vocals were up, too, but the slides are informative all by themselves.

I have never really understood the machinations that you have to go through to enable SSL, but Scot Gellock has posted a script to simplify part of it, i.e. getting the certificate. And he does it with freely available tools, which is always a nice bonus. : )

Rich Turner, PM on the Indigo team, answers lots of FAQs related to Indigo and how to prepare for it today, including:

• How do I prepare my code and systems to ease my adoption of Indigo?
• Which current technologies should I use, where and when?
• How will Indigo interoperate with systems based on existing platform and technologies?
• How much of my code will I have to change to migrate my code to Indigo?
• How will Services Perform & Scale?

Thanks for pointing me at Rich, folks. I’m enjoying his Indigo blog a great deal!

Rich Turner, a PM on the Microsoft Indigo team, has a pretty firm answer to the question of whether .NET remoting is dead: no.

I'm constantly amazed at man’s (and woman’s) ability to solve problems. Truly.

My call for Indigo bloggers was very successful (although most recommendations came via email), providing several interesting Indigo web blog possibilities. On the WinFS side, I only know about Mike Deem, and he seems to have gone into hybernation. Does anyone have anyone else that they'd like to recommend as a WinFS blogger? Thanks!