Sometimes I think the real reason they let me in the Design Partner program is to shut me up. It's been a long time, yeah? On the Domino & Notes development side it's difficult to have much to say right now because all my work is being done in the latest and increasingly greatest code drops from IBM. I'm prohibited from talking about the exciting new features so that leaves me a little speechless. As seems to be the case in so many things, the more you know they less you can say -- conversely, the people talking the most seem to know the least.

The news on the impending latest release -- Without being overly specific (and thus wearing out my welcome) I'm here to tell you now that I think 8.5.1 is going to be one of those classic 'awesome' releases. It looks to me like the kind you put in your long term tool kit and make your default choice for new systems or even to back down to if some future release doesn't look good for some reason. More and more of the seams between Notes and Eclipse are blurring or even going away along with many of the bugs that drive me the most crazy.

As the code drops have progressed, designer in eclipse has gotten increasingly stable, increasingly speedy, and increasingly feature rich (though there were some rough patches, to be sure). In this latest build, my favorite new big feature came with a bonus! Now it includes my newest favorite small feature built right into to. My code will be better from this day going forward as a result -- especially the code I write for "a quick little thing" that I don't plan to spend much time on. Those "quick little one-off" tasks will really benefit. I can't wait to show you what I'm doing, and I'm already getting pretty attached to it. I will not go back from this release. Period. That's not to say I'm 100% happy with all aspects of the product. There are some really important things I think still need a lot of attention and some things I think have totally jumped the shark. Overall though, there is nothing in 8.5.1 that isn't the same or better than it is is 8.5.0. Nothing has gotten worse, and most things have gotten better. Some things have gotten radically better.