I'm finally getting a chance to revisit InfoCenter. With major internal deliverables at work delivered, my book schedule finally getting back on track, with end of the year 'use or lose' vacation time upon us, and personal need for a better way to get my podcasts on my Zune, the project is back on.
The first go around was - as I mentioned - strictly an alpha, and I learned a fair bit. There were challenges with proxies, there were challenges with certain UI resolutions (prior to getting a 24 inch widescreen monitor myself, I had no idea how many folks were using them). For the alpha, I 'rolled my own' bits in a number of places - RSS, UI, etc. - because pieces of the platform that would have made this far easier, specifically IE7's RSS support and .NET Framework 3.0 were not available.
The good news is that IE7 and .NET Framework 3.0 are both released, so a large portion of the old code base has been retired. The new version has a Windows Presentation Foundation UI, utilizes the new feedstore, etc.
There's a commitment to some internal colleagues for an internal prototype a week from Monday. The focus of this drop will solely be on the podcasting/feed functionality, as this is what I continue to get emails about on a regular basis. The next drop will use the very cool Live Search macros as a replacement for the existing search functionality.
I might also mention that since the original version I've dabbled a bit with compact framework development, not to mention Atlas, so once I get v1 out the door, there may be some other interesting stuff coming...