Projects Coming Back

Having spent the better part of the last 7-8 months working with a dedicated team to revive GotDotNet, it excites me every time I see a cool project go up on Workspaces. In the site's darkest days, it was like a ghost town version of a website. I was reminded of the famous sign that was in Seattle many years ago during the "Boeing bust" when many jobs were lost: "Will the last person in Seattle please turn out the lights?" Despite the defections, I really believed that, if we could make the site better, cool projects would return. So, after Betsy Aoki teamed with our Ops group to right the ship, we suddenly felt confident that we could invite people back and not get too nervous. Lately, I keep finding cool CodeGallery projects and Workspaces that make me excited what lies ahead in the future. The are projects around blogging schema, the Pocket Outlook Object Model app for vCards, high performance computing labs. The latest is the “Project Server Visual Studio Team System Connector” application. It demonstrates how Project Server and Visual Studio Team System can be integrated together to provide extended value for project and resource managers and guides developers through the process of building and customizing components that link the project management and software development tools. This is a foundation for partners to build applications that can integrate the two server products and provide specialized functionality. The solution integrates Project Server 2003 and Visual Studio Team System (Beta 2) by synchronizing projects, resources, assignments/work items & reporting data.

When I see projects like these on GDN, I feel we’re on our way to re-establishing some credibility. I look forward to reporting more cool applications on GDN in the future. That said, I recommend you stay connected to Korby Parnell's blog. He is the product manager for the Community Collaborative Development technologies for Microsoft.com properties (of which GDN is techically a member) and he has an even better eye for these projects than I do...

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