Yesterday was an amazing day.
I finished the meat of a new release of the SDF. This release has some new VS .NET integration features which I think you guys will love. Well, I hope you do! I spent long enough reverse engineering VS .NET working out how the VSD team created the Smart Device tools so that OpenNETCF.org could provide a top class experience for our customers.
We have integrated our online help into the Visual Studio Combined Collection. Hitting F1 on an OpenNETCF keyword will now launch Help and navigate to the "best fit" topic. This really comes into its own when you have Help set to use an internal window.
The biggest change that users will see (when compared with the SDF beta) is that we now have our own Project type. As well as that, we have our own Project Wizard too. This results in a new project that already contains the essential SDF references and lets you start taking advantage of our hard work immediately. No fuss, no fiddling. Also, the Windows applications take advantage of Chris's super cool ApplicationEx class so you have plug in your Message Filters and start processing those WMs.
Just to add to the good feeling of getting a new build completed, we got some kick ass feedback from a couple of our customers. Unfortunately, feedback is a quite a rare thing so we're currently engaging a big drive to find out exactly what you think of us. What are we doing wrong? What are we doing right? How are you using our code? How did you find out about OpenNETCF in the first place? What features would you like to see in the future? Do you have something you'd like to contribute? Leave a comment or drop me an email at submissions@opennetcf.org.
Also, OpenNETCF.org is fast approaching its first anniversary. It's hard to believe that we've been doing this for a year, but it's a fact. The stats show that we're growing at a steady pace (spot the Christmas vacation drop-offs in the graph on ChrisTacke' blog!). We're getting somewhere in the region of 500 to 600+ hits a day on the site and we're not far from hitting the 40,000 downloads marker. This is fantastic news to me! As ChrisTacke points out, we are planning some anniversary shenanigans and since we'll be at both the MDC and the MVP Summit, come along and help us celebrate!