I installed SP2 on Friday morning, so far I haven't had any problems at all. I may be hallucinating but it seems as if IE is actually a little snappier.
Everything I need to run runs, and talks to what it needs to talk to.
I caught the news about Longhorn yesterday courtesy of Chris Sells' blog - Firm-ish release for sometime in 2006, Avalon and Indigo to be shipped for XP and Windows Server 2003, and WinFS not to be included in the Longhorn deployment.
The last was a major disappointment, I think WinFS is an idea whose time has come...in its absence (for now) I'd like to see consistent managed APIs for things like Contacts and so on (all that Outlooky stuff), much as is planned for the next version of Windows Mobile.
The planned availability of Indigo on XP and W2K3 is not actually anything new: if anything it's a bit sad that we apparently won't be seeing it for those platforms any earlier than the Longhorn release.
The Avalon announcement is the most positive development: apart from lessening the degree to which developers will be having to support differing display technologies, I think it's also a bonus for IE, since presumably it will be possible to have a single version of IE for Windows that can handle things like XAML documents, which will help to speed the adoption of the latter.
Pocket Blog Writer (This is what I'm currently calling my Compact Framework-based Pocket PC client for posting to .Text blogs. Uninspired, but hey, it's really cold around here these days): So far Paul Andrew and Paul Wakeford have posted from it successfully (at least once). Particular thanks to Paul Wakeford for drawing my attention to a bug that I'd missed - when I did away with the tab control and added a modal dialog for Configuration, I forgot to carry over the labels for the Username and Password fields. This is now fixed. BTW, since I've tried it myself in the field (e.g. not just from the emulator or a cradled device) I at least don't need to test that it doesn't just work for people called Paul...
I've also added a “New” menu item that clears all the fields on the entry form.
I'm considering adding functionality whereby posting again without clearing these fields automatically causes the post to be sent as an Edit, so that it acts as an amendment to the one that was just sent. First I need to test whether the web service handles its edits the way I assume. When it comes to future changes and enhancements a major consideration for me will be to keep the interface as simple as possible.
I also think I need to motivate myself to write a FAQ, or at the very least a ReadMe file.
On the subject of future development: Does anyone see any point in a Smartphone 2003 version? (other than the W?BIC factor of course.) If Bluetooth keyboards start to become available for the platform then input wouldn't be an issue, but there's always the problem of the itsy-bitsy display - I have trouble seeing the Smarphone as a text entry device. But I could be completely mistaken about that, so let me know. 'Cos it would be fun to write.
Lastly, a reminder: If you want to try the blog writer (and you have a .Text-based blog, you can handle the limitation of not posting with categories, you have the .NET Compact Framework installed, and so on and so forth), go to the Contact link and send me a message with your email address so I can send you the CAB file (let me know whether you want ARM or ARM4 or whatever, or failing that tell me what kind of device you have and which version of Windows Mobile/Pocket PC).