A bunch of people have already blogged the new MSN. I mean, it did launch yesterday. (I feel so behind the times).

However, I have to blog on my favorite new feature – integrated POP3 email. I started using Thunderbird because I wanted to keep my DevHawk email seperate from my work and personal email addresses. I used to use Outlook Express but the lack of junk mail filtering doomed that choice (I know about tools like POPFile, but I wanted a single app solution). I also tried Outlook 2003 which had good junk mail filtering but it was bad at keeping my email accounts seperate. The MSN Plus and MSN Premium both support accessing POP3 email address, keep the email seperate from my personal hotmail email and do a great job filtering junk. Cool!

Dave Hamilton is a Microsoft Consultant who’s currently working on CE project and is blogging his efforts. His CE-related posts provide a ton of infomation. He doesn’t explain what he’s building, but he does point out the the board he’s using is “intended for embedded media-centric devices”. Dave provides links to sites for Mini-ITX and EPIA enthusiasts.

Thanks to Michael Earls for the pointer to Dave’s blog.

I finally have my busted laptop back. I paved it and was in the process of reinstalling the important stuff when the storm hit. Since I’ll be moving back to that machine very soon, I figured I could break quarantine on the machine I’m currently using. Since the one thing you can’t run in Virtual PC is the embedded device emulator, I decided to install Windows CE. I stumbled across this article for DIY Wireless Access Points (from Wireless Hacks) which pointed me to a couple of embedded system vendors – Soekris and OpenBrick. I’d love to get CE up and running on one of those boxes and roll my own media client device, to learn about hacking embedded if for no other reason. I know Duncan has a cool homegrown audio PC project, but I was thinking something embedded would be even cooler.

There doesn’t seem to be much, if any, grass-roots community around building CE based devices. All the efforts on the embedded website seem to be geared towards large companies. For example, the US distributors of CE don’t list prices on their pages. I can only assume it’s a case of “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it”, at least for the individual developer. CE is not included in MSDN (though it used to be if memory serves). I can only find info on homebrew embedded hardware on Linux sites.

Where are there any other DIY or homebrew embedded sites that I don’t know about?

My team owns the architect track for TechEd 2004. We’re hoping to build on the very successful Architecture Symposium from PDC. As part of that effort, I own that community efforts for the architect track. I’m working on the plan now. Obviously, we’ll have “the usual” events: Ask the Experts, Birds of a Feather, Speaker Lounge, Attendee Party, etc. Any other suggestions? Please email me or leave a comment.

First Simon, then Ram, now another member of the .NET Enterprise Architecture Team is blogging. David Hill just started, but he’s already posted an article entitled “A Simplified Asynchronous Call Pattern for WinForm Applications“. In the article, David describes “how you can implement a simpler asynchronous call pattern which allows you to consume web services from a WinForm application without having to worry about threads ever again.” Cool!