A few months ago I blogged about my plans to create a Windows Phone application based on my Family Tree Research hobby.

Well after a 5 month delay I finally submitted the first version of the application to the Windows Phone Marketplace today.  I have made a few changes since my initial Blog Post.  The most obvious change is that I added support for multiple GEDCOM files.  The reason for this change was mainly for performance reasons. 

My research database contains upwards of 1200 individuals, and downloading, parsing and serializing a file of 1200 records takes about 30 seconds so by supporting multiple files on the phone would allow my to split my research data into multiple smaller files.

I also spent some time adding some graphics, which I created from public domain images on the web.

Hopefully, I will hear in a few days whether my submission has been approved. 

When that that happens I will provide some detail on how the application can be used, to carry your family tree research with you.

I was thinking last week that its been a while since I last blogged – and when I went to my site I realized that its almost been 6 months since I last put electronic “pen to paper”

Six months is a long time in the life of a developer.

Since February I have spoken at 4 conferences – MIX 11 in Vegas, VS Live in Vegas, DevTeach in Montreal and Prairie Dev Con in Regina. 

Microsoft have released their next version of their Phone OS Developer Tools (codenamed Mango) and have announced the new UX for “Windows 8”.

At DotNetNuke Corp (my employer) we have grown to close to 60 employees, and we are getting very close to releasing a major new version – DotNetNuke 6 – code-name “Hadron”.  This is one of the reasons why I haven’t blogged much recently as we have been “heads down”, working on this exciting new release.

So there’s lots to talk about, and hopefully I will be able to get back to the habit of regular blogging.