Well, I haven't been blogging much lately, instead spending my evening hours designing and building a web site for my wife Deanna's metal and fused glass sculpture.  And last Friday we finally launched the Central Park Studio website!

The site only contains a few of her many works, some of those which I had easy access to or already had workable photographs of.  We plan to photograph more and put up new pages every couple of days.

I haven't built a website in a few years, and learned a few things:

• Now I understand better why people have been clamoring for transparent png support in IE.  IE7 supports it, but I had to sniff browsers and do tricky tricks to get it working in IE6.
• IE is much more forgiving than Firefox.  A small error (in one case a missing quote) affected IE not at all, but set Firefox on a serious tailspin.
• Up front investment pays off.  I generate the site from a small number of XML files using XSLT.  This allows me to quickly add new artwork, as I don't even have to create a page for a new piece, just add a bit of metadata about the piece and the images associated with it.  Once I got this working well, adding new images was an almost exclusively Photoshop task.
• Photoshop drives me crazy.  And rocks!  For doing lots of image adjustment, color matching between images, sizing and so forth it does a great job.  I really wish however that the adjustment controls weren't all buried in a submenu.  Have I overlooked a handy image adjustment palette for one-click access to all the adjustment tools?
• Buying a domain name and hosting space is easier and cheaper than I would have believed.  I set aside a day for it, and the site was up and running, including email, within a couple of hours.

Anyway, check out the site, link to it ;-), and send me comments.  I've only tried it on IE7, IE6, and Firefox.  I'm sure there are many improvements that can be made (I've already got a list going).  Enjoy!

Well, at long last WS-Addressing has reached Recommendation status!  (At least, the Core and SOAP Binding have.)  I count this effort as quite successful.  The Working Group navigated some difficult and contentious issues, resulting in a specification that should traverse the shoals of interoperability safely.

This Working Group was an experiment in "fast track", with an aggressive schedule and a correspondingly higher bar for interop testing.  How did we do?  Here are the actual and projected milestones for WS-Addressing:

As you can see we didn't quite live up to our expectations, missing our projected delivery date by about 60%.  The largest lag was in CR testing, which IMO we started fairly promptly after issuing CR, worked on diligently, and completed about as rapidly as we could.  The only way to avoid this delay would have been to start interop testing way back in Last Call, but that is always a hard sell to implementers as the spec is still churning.

Anyway, I am quite pleased that we're done.  Especially since this was the last chance to lock down the namespace to deliver WS-Addressing 1.0 support in Windows Communication Foundation 1.0.  We caught the boat!