Been really busy...

I know, you’ve heard it before, but I’ve been really busy lately. I’ve been digging deep into Community Server helping some friends put together a community site. The more I dig into ASP.NET; the more I see how far web development has come yet still how far behind the curve “web based applications” are in relationship to “smart clients” in regards to usability and flexibility.

At least it’s a “consistent” programming model. ;-)

But that’s not all I’ve been doing. Of course, in addition to a full time job, I’ve been working on getting DVD Jukebox ready to ship, user group related activities and more. And don’t forget that on my huge TODO list, there’s this thing called XboxFriends.

I’m still not really sure what I want to do with it, but in the mean time I have decided to rewrite the desktop application from scratch. I know I’ve been neglecting it for a while, but it’s hard to prioritize something that consumes any significant amount of time that has nearly 0% return. In the end, I’ve realized that I’m just not utilizing the expense of Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox Live without having a decent utility to let me know when those people who I wouldn’t mind taking a break to “hang out” with are actually online.

In addition, there’s a few ideas that I’ve been toying around with and XboxFriends is a great testing ground for playing.

Here’s a screen shot showing the current progress.

With that said (and if you use Internet Explorer), you can download a new version utilizing ClickOnce. (I’ll do a write up a bit later with my usage woes with ClickOnce.) I still have a long way to go before getting this version where I’d like to see it, but it’s a great start and currently works better than the MSN Messenger “integrated” version.